Oscars 2016: 10 Things We Learned
The movie world’s own collective revenant finally came to an end on Sunday night as the 88th Academy Awards capped off six long months of speculation, soul-searching and social butterflying. Truth be told, it’s been an unusually compelling Oscar season from start to finish: The lack of a frontrunner kept the pundits on their toes, while the lack of any non-white people in any of the major categories kept the voters on their heels. And though #OscarsSoWhite will obviously be what history takes away from this year’s show (at least, it better be), it wasn’t the only thing that made 2016 such a standout. Here are the 10 biggest things we learned from last night’s show.
Leonardo DiCaprio Finally Caught Him What He Could
Thank God that Leo finally won an Oscar, because Hollywood may not have been able to survive another year of jokes about how badly he supposedly wanted one. For whatever reason, the world had decided that an actor using his clout to collaborate with major filmmakers on creatively ambitious projects was something to be mocked, and so DiCaprio became Gollum lusting after his precious — someone even made a videogame about the Titanic star’s “desperate hunt” for one of those little gold men. Because really, nothing says Oscarbait like a nearly wordless performance in which an actor covers himself in a mask of his own spit and eats a bison’s liver. Sure, all the hunting and grunting DiCaprio did in The Revenant may not stack up to his revelatory work in films like The Wolf of Wall Street and Catch Me If You Can, but mocking a superstar for having the guts to challenge himself is exactly the kind of bullshit that makes people feel like the Oscars do more harm than good. Let the man have his trophy.
Justice Prevails
This year’s Oscars were obsessed with exposing the blind-spots of a beloved institution, and so it was extremely fitting that the prize for Best Picture went to a film about … people who were obsessed with exposing the blind-spots of a beloved institution. Spotlight might be one of the whitest stories ever told (and the least flashy movie in competition), but there wasn’t a more appropriate choice among this group of nominees. A laser-focused procedural about the Boston Globe journalists whose work revealed the child abuse that the Catholic church had been perpetuating in plain sight, Spotlight is a testament to the idea that systemic problems must not be allowed to become permanent ones.
A Big Year for the Little Guys
Rocky Balboa may be the cinema’s ultimate underdog, but Sylvester Stallone was the heavy favorite to win Best Supporting Actor. So when venerable British thespian Mark Rylance walked away with the category for his beautiful performance as a soft-spoken Russian agent in Bridge of Spies, it was an early hint that these Oscars would be a big night for a new breed of little guys. That theme continued throughout the show: Not only did indie distributor A24 snag three trophies and prove that it can hang with the big boys, they were behind the evening’s biggest shock: Ex Machina, the company’s $15 million sexy robot movie, beat Star Wars for Best Special Effects.
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