The Great
After 2015’s rather humdrum affair and Neil-Patrick Harris’
fumbled hosting, the only way was up for 2016’s Academy Awards. Chris Rock
proved a furiously energetic host, addressing the diversity issue fearlessly
and mining it for enough material to fill an entire stand-up tour. A stirring
performance of Til it Happens to You from
Lady Gaga also brought the awful topic of campus sexual assault in the US
directly into the spotlight. As the assembled audience applauded for Rock and
cheered their support for Gaga, one couldn’t help feeling a small glimmer of
hope for the coming year; things could be very different if the stars assembled
in the Dolby Theater put their collective power to much-needed directives.
Where the dishing out of the actual trophies is concerned,
there was much to be thrilled about: George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road took home 6 awards (more than any other film
combined), for Sound Editing, Sound Mixing, Editing, Costume Design, Production
Design and Make-up & Hairstyling. This slew of awards for a gutsily
progressive post-apocalyptic blockbuster could prove a game-changer for The
Academy’s long-lost appreciation of genre films.
While Ridely Scott and J.J. Abrams failed to take home any
awards for The Martian or Star Wars: The Force Awakens (more on
that in a moment), Alex Garland’s Ex
Machina surprised everybody by taking home the award for Best Visual
Effects. Ex Machina cost just $15
million (under a tenth of Star Wars’
budget), and a reliance on more subtle effects over eye-lancing explosions and
planet-trekking vistas made it a very unlikely candidate despite enormous
critical praise.
With the exception of Jennifer Lawrence’s mop-making entrepreneur,
films featuring a character named Joy took home the gold: Pixar’s Inside Out won Best Animated Feature in
one of the least surprising revelations of the night, whilst Brie Larson won
Best Actress for her immeasurable performance in Lenny Abrahamson’s Room, thanking her co-star Jacob
Tremblay as she did so. Tremblay (though unrewarded for his similarly extraordinary
turn) also proved a hugely entertaining watch as he took to the stage alongside
Beast of No Nation’s Abraham Attah to
present an award (exclaiming to Chris Rock “I loved you in Madagascar!”) and
stood up on his seat to watch C-3PO, BB-8 and R2-D2 arrive on-stage.
Where The Revenant
was thought to be a sure-fire win, Tom McCarthy’s journo-drama Spotlight took Best Picture in a
last-minute shocker for which absolutely no-one was prepared but to which
everyone showed enormous respect, both for the films’ technical prowess and the
important, relevant issues at its heart.
The ‘Meh’
Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu’s snowbound tale of savagery made
a mark nonetheless: though he didn’t have a chance in hell, I’d have been
overjoyed for Matt Damon to win for a surprisingly moving performance in The Martian¸ but an era of internet humour came to an end instead as Leonardo
DiCaprio was awarded Best Actor (Kate Winslet looking on in tearful joy), and Iñárritu
got Best Director for the second year running. Emmanuel ‘Chivo’ Lubezki got the
gold for his work on the film, as Roger Deakins’ superior work for the
much-lauded Sicario meant another
Oscar-less year for the British cinematographer.
The Bad
Personally, there were only a couple of award choices that
rubbed me up the wrong way. The Martian’s
use of new techniques in VFX was left unrewarded and Nick Hornby’s wonderful Brooklyn went home empty-handed, but the
galling failure for me was Star Wars: The
Force Awakens’ lack of award for John Williams’s brilliant score. Ennio
Morricone’s work on Quentin Tarantino’s The
Hateful Eight felt more of a backing track interrupted by the director’s insistence
of throwing in tracks from The Thing (another
Morricone score) and Exorcist 2: The
Heretic, and the delivery of the award (much like DiCaprio’s), smacked of
another ‘long-time coming’ award in opposition of individual talent. Williams’ music
for J.J. Abrams’ glorious revitalisation brought back familiar themes and broke
new ground in the way Star Wars
sounded. It legitimately couldn’t be more triumphant and smile-broadening if
the jewel-case booklet included the method for world peace.
No comments:
Post a Comment