Chris Rock nailed it. It took him a while, but this year’s Academy Awards host got the show where he needed to go. He started with a solid monologue that addressed the #OscarsSoWhite controversy and matters of representation in America at large.
“This year’s In Memoriam montage is just going to be black people that were shot by cops on their way to the movies,” he declared, to uncomfortable laughter. It wasn’t all gold – a strange argument that diversity has only become an issue because black activists have run out of more important problems to tackle fell flat, as did a bizarre walk-on by Clueless actor turned Fox News correspondent Stacey Dash – but the message got through.
Most effective was a pre-taped visit by Rock to a theatre in Compton, where he asked predominantly African-American moviegoers whether they’d seen any of this year’s Best Picture contenders. At first the joke seemed to be that they hadn’t even heard of Bridge Of Spies, but Rock and his producers let the bit go on long enough for the real point to emerge: it’s not that these people weren’t aware of the Academy’s choices, it was that the Academy wasn’t aware of these people.
You could practically hear the audience squirming, forced to confront a divide they didn’t even know existed. Well, except for Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, whose By The Sea was cited as someone’s favourite movie in the bit. (This might, in some way, make up for the Academy overlooking that film entirely.)
As with every Oscar ceremony, there was far too much time wasted on bad ideas. A protracted bit where Rock tried to sell Girl Guide cookies to movie stars felt like a terrible attempt to recapture Ellen’s selfie moment another dud involved Rock introducing three Asian children in business suits as the keepers of the Academy’s ballots.
And the musical numbers built around two of the three best song nominees were less than ideal: a Cirque de Soleil-in-bondage number for The Weeknd’s Earned It, and the clumsy staging of Lady Gaga’s Hunting Ground closer Til It Happens To You that deflated the electricity of Vice President Joe Biden’s introduction, where he made an impassioned call for consent awareness and an end to rape culture.
As for the song that eventually won the night, Sam Smith’s whiny Spectre theme Writing’s On The Wall, well, the song is terrible but the presentation was simple and unfussy. However, Smith managed to ruin his night by declaring he was accepting his award as the first openly gay Oscar winner – a statement immediately debunked on social media by people who remember Howard Ashman, Stephen Sondheim and Elton John winning that very same award in earlier years.
(Apparently, Smith was quoting Ian McKellen talking specifically about the best actor prize – which, as far as I know, remains entirely hetero.)
But what of the awards themselves? After weeks of consensus and a general sense of inevitability, it turned out the Oscars had a few surprises in store for us after all.
Sylvester Stallone didn’t win best supporting actor for reprising his beloved character Rocky Balboa one last time in Creed that prize went to Mark Rylance for his typically considered turn as a reserved Russian operative in Bridge Of Spies.
Don Hertzfeldt’s masterpiece, World Of Tomorrow, lost the animated short prize to Chile’s well-made but not-at-all-a-masterpiece Bear Story.
And of course there was Spotlight, which only won two Academy Awards … but boy, did it win where it counted.
Tom McCarthy’s journalism procedural about the Boston Globe reporters who broke the story of the Catholic archdiocese’s knowledge and protection of predatory priests bookended the ceremony, with McCarthy and Josh Singer winning the night’s first prize, best original screenplay, and the last: best picture.
Spotlight’s ultimate triumph was even more shocking because for a while, The Revenant had looked like the evening’s big winner. After an initial run of technical wins for Mad Max: Fury Road (six in all, including film editing) that was broken when Ex Machina took visual effects, George Miller saw his apocalyptic demolition derby sidelined by the High Art juggernaut of Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s The Revenant, which won three major prizes: director for Iñárritu, his second consecutive win, after last year’s Birdman Or (The Unexpected Virtue Of Ignorance) cinematography for Emmanuel Lubezki, his third straight win after Birdman and Gravity, and the long-declared best actor prize for Leonardo DiCaprio.
The Revenant’s wins weren’t a surprise. Like a number of the evening’s other awards – Brie Larson’s best actress prize for Room, Alicia Vikander’s supporting actress win for The Danish Girl, Adam McKay and Charles Randolph winning adapted screenplay for The Big Short, Son Of Saul taking the foreign-language prize, Inside Out’s animated-feature win (announced by Toy Story’s Buzz and Woody, for crying out loud), even Asif Kapadia’s Amy snatching the best documentary feature prize from Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Look Of Silence – those had been expected more or less since the nominations were announced in mid-January.
But then Spotlight won best picture, and – as with Rylance’s name being read instead of Stallone’s when that supporting-actor envelope was opened – the Academy surprised everyone. For all my cynicism about the Oscars, they got it right: sure, I’d rather have seen Fury Road take the top prize, but George Miller can go home with six Oscars and the knowledge that his transcendent action movie was taken as seriously as any other movie this year.
Spotlight may not be as flashy or explosive, but it’s an expertly crafted drama and a showcase for the sort of subtle, considered acting that might not win individual prizes, but works in support of the story and the overall tone. And the best-picture honour means people who missed it in theatres are more likely to go looking for it now that it’s available on disc and VOD.
Sometimes things just work out, you know? And Tom McCarthy, who started 2015 as the director of a godawful Adam Sandler film, now stands as the guy whose underdog newspaper movie turned into the biggest surprise of the night – something even All The President’s Men, the Watergate drama now revered as one of the best movies of the 70s, couldn’t accomplish.
You know what beat it? Rocky. And Sylvester Stallone didn’t win an Oscar that time, either.
