It’s been another good year for film and the award season has been rounded off with the 85th Academy Awards (also known as the Oscars) which were held on Sunday 24th February.
This year I made it my personal goal to see as many nominated films as I could. I got round to watching over 20 of them with my personal favourites being Django Unchained and Argo. Django Unchained was a perfect blend of violence, comedy and great characters. Christoph Waltz received an award for Best Supporting Actor (who also wins best speech in my book) and Tarantino picked up Best Writing.
Argo claimed the top awards including Best Picture, Best Writing (Adapted Screenplay) and Best Film Editing. This was a nice “in your face” for Ben Affleck’s nomination snub for Best Director, a title which Argo has won at other award ceremonies including the BAFTAs and Golden Globes and quite frankly something Affleck deserves to be credited for. Host Seth Macfarlane jokingly remarked that “the story was so top secret, that the film’s director is unknown to the academy…they know they screwed up.”
It wasn’t a bad night for Life of Pi either which picked up four awards with Ang Lee accepting his second Oscar for directing. Predictable awards also went out to Lincoln, Silver Linings Playbook and Les Misérables. While in recent years the Oscars have been very predictable, this year did credit most who deserved it but I still found myself able to predict most of the winners (my predictions were based on what I knew Hollywood would go for). Being a hardcore Pixar fan I will actually admit that I would have preferred to see Wreck-It Ralph take the award for Best Animation but I did predict the Academy would give it to Brave.
The ceremony paid tribute to music in film, Macfarlane co-wrote a number of songs that he sang and the cast of Les Misérables made an appearance on stage too. In my opinion Seth Macfarlane did a pretty good job at hosting the ceremony. As predicted there were some jokes that not everyone enjoyed but what else can you expect from Macfarlane, the man that’s already insulted half of the celebrities in the room through Family Guy.
Other parts in the ceremony worth mentioning include the appearance of William Shatner, the awkward comedy from the Avengers cast and Michelle Obama presenting the Best Picture award, for some unknown reason.
When it comes down to it the Oscars is just a way of crediting film-makers, most of whom have already been rewarded greatly in box office success. In the words of Billy Crystal: “because nothing can take the sting out of the world’s economic problems like watching millionaires present each other with gold statues.” That being said the Oscars is always good fun to watch and I’m looking forward to the various movies coming out this year.
Here’s a few fun Oscars facts:
- The award for Best Sound Editing was a tie between Skyfall and Zero Dark Thirty, this is only the sixth tie for any academy award, the last tie was in 1994.
- Daniel Day-Lewis is the first to have won Best Actor three times in Academy Awards history.
- Adele’s Skyfall is the first James Bond theme to win an Oscar for Best Original Song.
Intresting, I have to admit I’ve not seen many of the Oscars films this year. A great deal of them are on my to do list. But the Oscars were a good watch.