However the biggest shock of the evening was the Best Picture Oscar being awarded to Spotlight. The script by Josh Singer and Tom McCarthy tells the story of the Boston Globe’s Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation of sex abuse by Catholic priests.
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After four nominations without a win, the fifth time was the charm, thanks to his performance as a vengeful frontiersman in “The Revenant”. “The Revenant”, which came in with a leading 12 nods, also earned Alejandro G. Inarritu his second best director Oscar in a row. It’s a feat matched by only two other filmmakers: John Ford and Joseph L. Mankiewicz.
Inarritu, whose win meant three straight years of Mexican filmmakers winning best director, was one of the few winners to remark passionately on diversity in his acceptance speech. As predicted, Brie Larson captured the Oscar for Best Actress for her riveting and I mean riveting work in “Room”.
Among surprises, Britain’s Mark Rylance beat presumed favorite and “Creed” actor Sylvester Stallone to win the Academy Award for best supporting actor for “Bridge of Spies”.
Carol, Brooklyn and The Martian, among the most acclaimed movies of the year, had 17 nominations between them, but each failed to win in a single category.
“At a simple level, you’re not trying to use dialogue as exposition, you’re using it as part of behaviour, and language itself is distorted,”Miller said in his interview”.
It has gone to Alicia Vikander, who played the artist wife of a gender-changing painter in The Danish Girl. Smith co-wrote the song with James Napier. Leonardo DiCaprio won his first Oscar for his role in the brutal frontier epic, “The Revenant”. It was for Quentin Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight”. The Best sound mixing award also goes to Mad Max: Fury Road.
The show got off to a brisk start thanks to host Chris Rock’s no-holds-barred monologue. “The one thing I will say about a movie like this is it’s basically visual music”.
Last year’s telecast, hosted by Neil Patrick Harris, slid 16 percent to 36.6 million viewers, a six-year low. “Making “The Revenant” was about man’s relationship to the natural world, a world that we collectively felt in 2015 as the hottest year in recorded history” he said.
“We were too busy being raped and lynched to care about who won best cinematographer”, Rock added. He passed away last week.
“In the In Memoriam package, it’s just going to be black people shot by the cops on the way to the movies”.
Lou Gossett Jr., an Oscar victor for “An Officer and a Gentleman”, said on the red carpet that often Hollywood is ahead of society, but in the case of diversity, “society is ahead of us”.
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Rock also had some more lighthearted material, including a bit in which he brought out his daughter to sell Girl Scout cookies. It was a moment worth waiting for to see the crowd offer a standing ovation to Vice President Joe Biden who took to the stage to introduce Lady Gaga who took to the stage to perform the song “Til It Happens to You”.
