The 88th Academy Awards finally announced this year’s winners and there were hardly any surprises – that’s a good thing. The biggest winner turned out to be Mad Max: Fury Road which won six Oscars out of its 10 nominations, while the most nominated film The Revenant won only three Oscars out of its 12 nominations. However, The Revenant took home two of the big ones: Best Actor (Leonardo DiCaprio’s first Oscar) and Best Director (Alejandro Iñárritu’s second Oscar in a row and now going for a hat trick). Who is the biggest “loser”? Well that would be my pick for Best Picture, and the third most nominated film of the year, The Martian which won none out of its seven nominations.
Throughout the week we have been doing critical analysis of the films nominated, ranking all the best work in the 10 major categories, according to their merit. Seven out of 10 times our number one pick won the Oscars this year. Two out of three times we got it wrong, the winner was our number two pick. The big surprise (and a happy one) was Spotlight winning Best Picture. The reason it’s so difficult to choose the winner for this category is because they use preferential voting method with recursive elimination for Best Picture instead of the standard pick-your-favourite voting method used in every other category.
Here’s the list of Oscar winners along with the reasons why we choose them.
The seven deserving winners:
ACTOR IN A LEADING ROLE
Winner: Leonardo DiCaprio (The Revenant)
My Pick: Leonardo DiCaprio (The Revenant), for enduring extreme conditions to breathe life into a character that does not represent a single person but an entire generation.
ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE
Winner: Mark Rylance (Bridge Of Spies)
My Pick: Mark Rylance (Bridge Of Spies), for giving such an intelligent performance that will be studied by the experts of the craft of acting for years to come.
ACTRESS IN A LEADING ROLE
Winner: Brie Larson (Room)
My Pick: Brie Larson (Room), for revealing the inner workings of the sacrificing soul and the nature of the purest form of love, the love between mother and child.
ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Winner: Spotlight (Tom McCarthy and Josh Singer)
My Pick: Spotlight (Tom McCarthy and Josh Singer), for honouring journalism by creating a screenplay, through extensive research, that is one of the greatest ever written.
CINEMATOGRAPHY
Winner: The Revenant (Emmanuel Lubezki)
My Pick: The Revenant (Emmanuel Lubezki), for bringing the excitement of hard-hitting realistic photography back into cinema.
ORIGINAL SCORE
Winner: The Hateful Eight (Ennio Morricone)
My Pick: The Hateful Eight (Ennio Morricone), for the unabashedly glittering music that captures the love of movies as the best form of public entertainment.
DIRECTOR
Winner: The Revenant (Alejandro G Iñárritu)
My Pick: The Revenant (Alejandro G Iñárritu), for taking the risk of telling an important story of the genocide of the Native Americans, articulated with incredible clarity.
The three that got away:
BEST PICTURE
Winner: Spotlight
My Pick: The Martian, for giving science fiction the serious treatment it deserves and influencing future space missions.
ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE
Winner: Alicia Vikander (The Danish Girl)
My Pick: Kate Winslet (Steve Jobs), for embodying a character not by imitation, but by deep empathy, that compelled us to suspend all disbelief.
FILM EDITING
Winner: Mad Max: Fury Road (Margaret Sixel)
My Pick: The Big Short (Hank Corwin), for a flamboyant storytelling method using – title cards, famous quotes, still photographs, music videos, and celebrities – to inject the financial gobbledygook of the stock market into pop-culture.
Here are two of the most deserving winners this year that we haven’t covered before:
BEST ANIMATED FILM
Winner: Inside Out
My Pick: Inside Out, for creating an entertainment that is not only a masterpiece but something that will contribute to the mental health of children and parents alike.
BEST DOCUMENTARY FILM
Winner: Amy
My Pick: Amy, for creating a new language of documentary filmmaking where a person is brought to life through archival footage like never before.
