It's time to sift through the debris! Let's clear away the rubble of Oscar night and seek out interesting trivia of note, check back in with our prediction triumphs and foibles, and more. We'll frame this with a complete list of winners if, by some extraordinary circumstance, you've missed knowing about them. If so can you account for your actions last night? What on earth is more important than the Oscars? (Except that event to help out citizens of Flint, MI poisoned by their own GOP led government so, well done, Ava DuVernay and others)
But first the sordid topic of punditry! In many ways this was a difficult year to predict the prizes with three(!) genuine upsets on the big nights (Mark Rylance, Sam Smith, Ex Machina) a Best Picture race that was truly difficult to read given precursor disagreements and the Best Film of the Year sidelined altogether (When it comes to the Academy's treatment of Carol... quoth Abby "I can't help you with that."). If you check in with the Oscar Chart Index, you'll see an overview of how well I did but it breaks down like so... I completed aced the Best Short categories (go me) but otherwise flailed about hopelessly because I had predicted 6 Oscars for The Revenant and 3 for Mad Max which is the opposite of what occurred. Not even my wishful thinking helped me get over my fear that Oscar just wouldn't know what to do with a genre achievement that gonzo. [more after the jump...]
The SPOTLIGHT team freaking out with joy. As well they should have.
Glenn already discussed how rare Mad Max: Fury Road's Oscar haul was historically but here's another historical concept proposal: I think this is the Academy's biggest achievement in ignoring their natural biases about in-your-face genre achievements since The Silence of the Lambs 25 whole years ago.
Okay let's get to the trivia
THE HEADLINERS
Picture: Spotlight
As noted whilst live blogging, Spotlight is NOT the least winning Best Picture ever, misinformation I knew would spread like wildfire though I don't quite think I was able to nip it in the bud in time last night as I saw people tweeting it quickly. Best Picture winners that have fewer than three shiny statues are:
Wings (1927) 2 Oscars from 2 nominations
The Broadway Melody (1929): 1 Oscar from 3 nominations
All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) 2 Oscars from 4 nominations
Grand Hotel (1932) 1 Oscar from 1 nomination
Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) 1 Oscar from 8 nominations
You Can't Take It With You (1938): 2 Oscars from 7 nominations
Rebecca (1940) 2 Oscars from 11 nominations
The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) 2 Oscars from 5 nominations
Spotlight (2015) 2 Oscars from 6 nominations
Spotlight is in real good company there. If you ignore Greatest Show and Broadway Melody that is a mighty fine group of classics!
Kind of elegant that SPOTLIGHT took the first award of the night, the last award of the night, and nothing in between.
— Guy Lodge (@GuyLodge) February 29, 2016
Before Spotlight even entered the race there was talk that no journalism picture had ever won the top prize. People have quibbled with that but it's true-ish. It Happened One Night (1934), one of the all time great movies, was about a journalist (Clark Gable) pursuing a story (Claudette Colbert) but journalism wasn't really the topic.
Two of the four producing winners on Spotlight are women. The first female to ever win this prize was Julia Phillips for The Sting (1973) -- lovers of Hollywood dirt MUST read her trashy autobiography "You'll Never Eat Lunch In This Town Again". Female winners have stayed relatively uncommon. Spotlight's Nicole Rocklin, Blythe Pagon Faust fill out the top and only ten women to have won this prize. Previous winners: Phillips, Lili Finn Zanuck (Driving Miss Daisy), Wendy Finerman (Forrest Gump), Donna Gigliotti (Shakespeare in Love) Fran Walsh (The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King), Cathy Schulman (Crash), and Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker), and Dede Gardner (12 Years a Slave). No female solo producer has ever won this prize though plenty of solo male producers have.
Good luck charm: Michael Keaton has now headlined two back-to-back Best Pictures (Birdman and Spotlight) though curiously he wasn't nominated for Spotlight despite deserving the actual Oscar. His next film is The Founder, a biopic about the man who started the McDonald's fast-food phenomenon. Should we be taking that seriously already?
Update From the Comments
Best Pictures are winning fewer and fewer Oscars these days. Begone Sweeps! Jonathan in the comments suggests that the average overall is 5.3 but this decade not one Best Picture has managed it! Interesting.
Actress in a Leading Role: Brie Larson, Room
Actress in a Leading Role, Part Two: Alicia Vikander, The Danish Girl
Alicia Vikander is only the second Scandinavian actor to win gold if you can believe it. (Kevin O' Keefe helpfully notes that she is "also the first robot to kill her creator and emerge into the real world to win a competitive Oscar." But surely not the last.) The four most famous Nordic movie stars of all time are surely Greta Garbo, Ingrid Bergman, Liv Ullman*, and Max Von Sydow. Of the quartet, only Bergman ever won an Oscar (three actually) though the others were nominated. Garbo was later granted an Honorary but Von Sydow and Ullman, both still alive and working, would be great choices for Honoraries (hint hint Academy). *For some reason almost all famous Scandinavian crossovers are Swedish. No Danish actor has ever been nominated for an Oscar and Liv Ullman is the only Norwegian.
I haven't done the research on this because I shudder to think how difficult it will be but this might be the closest the two female winners have ever been in age (Alicia is 27, Brie is 26). These Libras were born exactly 363 days apart from each other on October 3rd, 1988 and October 1st 1989. These are fairly common ages for actresses to win but it's always worth reiterating that Hollywood has terribly sexist double standards. George Chakiris was Alicia's age when he won Supporting for West Side Story (1961) and he's the second youngest male winner of all time in the acting categories (Timothy Hutton Leading Actor of a Supporting Win in Ordinary People at 20 will probably keep the record forever)
Update: the closest age female winners were actually Streep & Lange who were 33 when they won for Sophie's Choice and Tootsie (also both arguing leading roles) and born only 63 days apart.
Actor in a Leading Role: Leonardo DiCaprio, The Revenant
Actor in a Supporting Role: Mark Rylance, Bridge of Spies
Mark Rylance has been nominated for an Emmy once previously and seems bound to win at some point if he keeps up the TV work. He's halfway to an EGOT now, since he has an overachiever's three Tony Awards and a surprise Oscar. (More on Leo soon but everyone knew his win was coming). Rylance becomes only the second acting winner from a Spielberg film after Daniel Day Lewis's Lincoln. (Murtada ranked all the Spielberg related nominees here -- that was fun!)
AUTEURS & SCRIBES
Director: The Revenant, Alejandro González Iñárritu
Adapted Screenplay: The Big Short, by Charles Randolph and Adam McKay
Original Screenplay: Spotlight, by Tom Mccarthy and Josh Singer
Iñárritu becomes only the third director after John Ford (1940's The Grapes of Wrath and 1941's How Green Was My Valley) and Joseph L Mankiewicz (1949's A Letter to Three Wives and 1950's All About Eve) to win back-to-back Directing Oscars. Curiously no director has ever accomplished the feat of helming back-to-back Best Picture winners.
Tom McCarthy and Adam McKay join a very long list of famous directors who have Screenplay Oscars like Screenplays are a consolation prizes. They're NOT of course (don't misunderstand) but sometimes that's the best certain auteurs can ever hope for -- especially the singular iconoclastic auteurs like the Almodovar's and Tarantino's of the world. This is, for example, the only Oscar Todd Haynes might ever win (he usually writes his own stuff, Carol being an exception) so we hope he gets one at some point!
Adam McKay, who co-wrote Ant-Man, becomes the first Marvel screenwriter to win an Oscar albeit not for a Marvel film. Joss Whedon was once nominated though (co-writing Toy Story)
Update from the Comments: Though he wasn't a winner last night we believe that Tom Hooper is the first director to serve Oscar winning performances in three consecutive films (The King's Speech, Les Miserables, The Danish Girl). Other directors have more Oscar winning performances but usually they didn't spring from consecutive pictures.