So, the whole Oscar experience is over for another year. The awards themselves took a fairly predictable course with no major upsets.
Gravity cleaned up on the technical side, Dallas Buyers Club was recognised for its performances, 12 Years a Slave snagged the biggest prize and American Hustle lost out altogether despite having 10 nominations.
The full list of winners (excluding shorts) are listed below. From my point of view, the one major gaffe was giving Her best original screenplay ahead of much more worthy candidates, and that was one award I did expect American Hustle to win. However, I did manage to successfully predict 18 of the 21 winners.
BEST FILM: 12 Years a Slave
BEST DIRECTOR: Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón)
BEST ACTOR: Matthew McConaughey (Dallas Buyers Club)
BEST ACTRESS: Cate Blanchett (Blue Jasmine)
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Jared Leto (Dallas Buyers Club)
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Lupita Nyong’o (12 Years a Slave)
BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY: 12 Years a Slave (John Ridley)
BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY: Her (Spike Jonze)
Best Animated Feature: Frozen (Chris Buck, Jennifer Lee, Peter Del Vecho)
Best Cinematography: Gravity (Emmanuel Lubezki)
Best Costume Design: The Great Gatsby (Catherine Martin)
Best Documentary Feature: 20 Feet from Stardom (Caitrin Rogers, Gil Friesen, Morgan Neville)
Best Film Editing: Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón, Mark Sanger)
Best Foreign Language Film: The Great Beauty (Italy)
Best Makeup and Hairstyling: Dallas Buyers Club (Adruitha Lee, Robin Mathews)
Best Original Score: Gravity (Steven Price)
Best Original Song: Let It Go (Frozen)
Best Production Design: The Great Gatsby (Catherine Martin and Beverley Dunn)
Best Sound Editing: Gravity (Glenn Freemantle)
Best Sound Mixing: Gravity (Skip Lievsay, Niv Adiri, Christopher Benstead, Chris Munro)
Best Visual Effects: Gravity (Tim Webber, Chris Lawrence, Dave Shirk, Neil Corbould)
As for the ceremony itself, it was devoid of any major controversial moments, which inevitably means that it also lacked too many memorable ones, but it did feature numerous actors and actresses demonstrating their inability to read an autocue. Chris Hemsworth and Charlize Theron made a complete hash of their presentation and John Travolta managed to introduce Idina Menzel as Adela Dazeem! Amongst the line stumblers and fluffers, Joseph Gordon Levitt with Emma Watson, Kevin Spacey and Christoph Waltz were by far the most assured and accomplished.
Ellen Degeneres, as host, has some pretty mediocre material to work with but was a warm and likeable presence, and her extended gag around ordering, serving and collecting money for a pizza was highly amusing. I was less impressed but her world record breaking retweeting of a selfie, but then again, I’m not on twitter and don’t take selfies!
Speaking of tweets, back in the Sky Studio, Alex Zane had a better crop of guests than most years. As much as I used to like the band Adult Net and admire her for staying married to Mark E Smith for the time she did, I never understood why Brix Smith seemed to be a fixture on the Sky sofa until this year. Instead, joining the reliable Boyd Hilton were Ben Miller and Emilia Fox. However, they had little chance to show any insight as Zane seemed more intent on reading out viewers’ tweets, maybe in amazement that there was any live audience out there at such an ungodly hour!
It was trumpeted in advance that the theme of this year’s show would be ‘heroes’. But that seemed to result in a just a handful of montages, including one of ‘everyday heroes’ that included both Lawrence of Arabia and Ben Hur. They really do have a different perspective on things in Hollywood…
Of the acceptance speeches. Leto and Nyong’o, picking up their supporting awards, were the most impressive but it was left to Matthew McConaughey to deliver the most bonkers one. Staring with crediting God, he was soon doing an impression of his Dad dancing before explaining that is hero is himself in 10 years time. Hopefully, the upward trajectory of his career will continue and he will be picking up many more awards in the future, as I am looking forward to more frontier gibberish like that!
In the end, it seemed a fitting climax to the show to have director Steve McQueen literally jumping for joy on stage as his film picked up the best picture prize.