Category: academy awards

84 AU community members entered our Oscar Ballot contest. Our winner got 16 correct, while one ballot only got 4 correct. There were some good surprises during the ceremony Sunday night (like Olivia Colman winning her well-deserved best actress statuette), and some not so-great surprises (Green Book winning Best Picture? Really?), overall our entrants were pretty accurate in predicting the outcomes of each category. Here’s a look at AU’s picks to win (the nominees with the majority of your votes), and how we did in each category.

Best Picture

AU Pick: Roma

The Academy Pick: Green Book

I’m with Spike Lee on this one— I was not expecting Green Book to walk away with this award. In fact, only 6 of our 82 ballots picked Green Book. Roma was far and away the favorite, with 39 votes, followed by Black Panther with 14.

Actor in a Leading Role

AU Pick: Rami Malek, Bohemian Rhapsody

Academy’s Pick: Rami Malek, Bohemian Rhapsody

Actress in a Leading Role

AU Pick: Glenn Close, The Wife

Academy Pick: Olivia Colman, The Favourite

I’ve never been happier to be wrong in my life. All the buzz was around Glenn Close, and I picked her for my ballot, but I really, really wanted Olivia Colman to win. Her performance as Queen Anne in The Favourite blew me away. Overall, Colman only received 15 votes (tied with Yalitza Aparicio) to Glenn Close’s 31. Lady Gaga was the second overall pick with 26.

Actor in a Supporting Role

AU Pick: Mahershala Ali, Green Book

Academy Pick: Mahershala Ali, Green Book

No surprises here, as Ali received more than double the number of votes than our second-place pick Adam Driver.

Actress in a Supporting Role

AU Pick: Regina King, If Beale Street Could Talk

Academy Pick: Regina King, If Beale Street Could Talk

Again, no surprises, as Regina King was a force to be reckoned with in Beale Street. Her dress was also probably my favorite of the night.

Animated Feature Film

AU Pick: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

Academy Pick: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

This should have been nominated for Best Picture, just saying. 67 of you chose Spider-Man, a whopping 77 % of our total voters.

Cinematography

AU Pick: Roma

Academy Pick: Roma

Costume Design

AU Pick: Ruth Carter, Black Panther

Academy Pick: Ruth Carter, Black Panther

See my blog post from a few weeks ago. A very, very well-deserved win for Ruth Carter.

Directing

AU Pick: Alfonso Cuaron, Roma

Academy Pick: Alfonso Cuaron, Roma

I picked Spike Lee (the second overall pick at AU), but the majority of you got it right. 44 votes for Cuaron, and 28 votes for Lee.

Documentary (Feature)

AU Pick: RBG

Academy Pick: Free Solo

Of all the ones the AU voices got wrong, this was the most off. 49 of you voted for RBG, and Free Solo, the actual winner, only got 16 of your votes, just edging out Minding the Gap in third with 14.

Documentary (Short Subject)

AU Pick: Black Sheep

Academy Pick: Period. End of Sentence.

This race was actually very close.

Film Editing

AU Pick: Bohemian Rhapsody

Academy Pick: Bohemian Rhapsody

Foreign Language Film

AU Pick: Roma

Academy Pick: Roma

Makeup and Hairstyling

AU Pick: Mary, Queen of Scots

Academy Pick: Vice

AU was more wowed by the ornate (though historically inaccurate) hairdos on display in Mary, Queen of Scots than Christian Bale’s transformation into Dick Cheney.

Music (Original Score)

AU Pick: Ludwig Goransson, Black Panther

Academy Pick: Ludwig Goransson, Black Panther

Music (Original Song)

AU Pick: Lady Gaga, Shallow (A Star is Born)

Academy Pick: Lady Gaga, Shallow (A Star is Born)

Lady Gaga blew away her nearest competition (Kendrick Lamar’s All the Stars) 68-14.

Production Design

AU Pick: Black Panther

Academy Pick: Black Panther

Hannah Beachler is the first African-American to win this award. She essentially built Wakanda from the ground up.

Animated Short Film

AU Pick: Bao

Academy Pick: Bao

Live Action Short Film

AU Pick: Mother

Academy Pick: Skin

Skin was AU’s third pick overall, behind Mother and Marguerite.

Sound Editing

AU Pick: Bohemian Rhapsody

Academy Pick: Bohemian Rhapsody

Sound Mixing

AU Pick: Bohemian Rhapsody

Academy Pick: Bohemian Rhapsody

Visual Effects

AU Pick: Avengers: Infinity War

Academy Pick: First Man

First Man was AU’s second overall choice with 16 votes. Avengers garnered 44.

Adapted Screenplay

AU Pick: BlacKkKlansman

Academy Pick: BlacKkKlansman

If Spike Lee jumping into Samuel L. Jackson’s arms doesn’t bring you joy, I don’t know what will.

Original Screenplay

AU Pick: Roma

Academy Pick: Green Book

Roma just narrowly edged out Green Book with AU voters 27-25.

So, how did we do?

Overall, AU voters selected 16/24 of the winners. Given some of the night’s surprises, I’d say that’s a pretty good record.

1989 was a bit of a surreal year – the Berlin Wall came down, the Tiananmen Square protests gripped the world…. And a hostless Academy Awards ceremony become infamous in the annals of Hollywood history.

Just like this year, the producers of the 1989 Oscars ceremony failed to find a host for the event. This time around, the award’s producers are cutting, cutting, cutting. There won’t be any performances of the Best Original Song nominees, three categories are being relegated to commercial breaks… and the ceremony is still supposed to last over three hours. Presumably cutting the host means cutting the opening monologue, and the inane stunts in the middle of the ceremony, right? Surely that leaves time for the actual awards and the songs?

Perhaps the producers are trying to avoid a repeat of the 1989 ceremony, which was… a disaster. A total, unmitigated, humiliating disaster that I can’t believe didn’t end Rob Lowe’s career. The ceremony began with an opening number sung by Lowe and a campy, Disney-esque Snow White (Disney later sued for copyright infringement). This opening number… it’s something. Lowe and the pale princess dance and scamper about with people dressed as tables and stars. Snow White sounds more like Lina Lamont than an angelic princesses. It’s campy, but not glorious or self-aware campy. It’s just cringey. I made it to 1:19 before I had to stop the video:

It lasts eleven and a half minutes. You think it’s going to get better when Snow White leaves the stage and is replaced by couples dancing the samba, but then Merv Griffin appears, and he starts singing “I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts.” Then the women with huge coconut cocktails on their heads appear. And they start dancing. And there’s a sparkly cowboy? Who just seems to be chilling on the stage? The whole thing is briefly redeemed by Cyd Charisse, but then Snow White is back? And Rob Lowe is her blind date? And they sing? And the tables dance?

I fast forwarded from there and briefly resumed watching when there was suddenly a kick line.

Really, it’s not good.

There’s a second musical number later in the show. Don’t subject yourself to that.

By the end of the broadcast, the show’s producer, Allan Carr, would never work in Hollywood again—even if he did draw a record number of viewers.

So, what went wrong? Hollywood, and most of the viewing public, agreed that the ceremony was over the top and embarrassing. Seventeen former Oscar winners, including Julie Andrews and Gregory Peck, signed a letter condemning the ceremony as “an embarrassment to the Academy and the motion picture industry.” The denizens of a hugely popular industry gathered to celebrate another year or artistry and skill, and Allan Carr and his musical review made a mockery of everything Hollywood wanted to take pride in.

Today, the Academy is facing similar problems as it did in the lead up to the 1989 ceremony. Viewership is flagging, and valid criticisms of the Academy (such as #OscarsSoWhite), highlight that Hollywood is disconnected from the people who watch its movies. It will be interesting to see how the ceremony attempts to woo that audience back, and if they’ll repeat the same mistakes as 1989.

Let’s take a hot minute to talk about the most important category at the Academy Awards—Best Costume Design. Historical costume dramas a la Anna Karenina, The Great Gatsby, or The Duchess (basically any Keira Knightley movie) typically dominate this category, and that’s probably one of the reasons why it’s the award I most look forward to each year. I could rhapsodize for days about how subtle differences in fabric, colors, and cuts reflect Jane Eyre’s emotional growth and confidence in Cary Fukunaga’s Jane Eyre. On the other hand, I walked out of The Crimes of Grindelwald annoyed by the fact that all the characters were dressed in styles from 1939, not 1925.

Despite the category’s history, I don’t think any of the period dramas will take home the award this year. Instead, I think that Ruth Carter will emerge victorious because of her incredible Afro-Futurist costumes for Black Panther. Black Panther struck that sweet spot between statement and detail, and I think the Academy will reward Carter for that. The costumes also went a long way towards building the world of Wakanda. Along with director Ryan Coogler and production designer Hannah Beachler, Ruth Carter built a nation with its own history, materials, and traditions. Though she drew heavily from traditional dress across the African continent, she laced it with modern details—like a 3D printed headdress for Angela Basset’s Queen Ramonda, or recycled mesh for Letitia Wright’s Shuri—that reflected Wakanda’s technological advancement and resistance to colonization. Carter had a story behind every costume, and you can tell that she sat down and asked herself how the clothes characters wear reflect their personalities, positions, and choices. As I watched this incredible film, I imagined the characters dressing themselves, rather than a costumer dressing mannequins.

Ruth Carter and Black Panther definitely deserve to win, but if this film had come out six years ago, I doubt it would have won. For one thing, the Academy’s obvious bias towards costume dramas with overwhelmingly white casts would be hard to overcome. Black Panther is up against the structured, dramatic early 1700s gowns of The Favourite, the Depression era-chic of Mary Poppins Returns, the old American West of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, and the faux-Renaissance costuming of Mary Queen of Scots. Still, in the past five years, the Academy has shown signs of a shift. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them won the category in 2016, and it blended fantastical wizard wear with 20s fashion (don’t get me started on how much the Academy loves 20s costumes); and in 2015 the winner was Mad Max: Fury Road. To say that nothing quite like Mad Max had ever won Best Costuming would be an understatement, and it signals to me that the Academy is learning to look beyond hoop skirts and pretty white flappers.

Beyond these two recent winners, there are two other fantasy/sci fi films that won the category, and each of them were paradigm shifting. The first is the first Star Wars movie, which I don’t need to tell you was groundbreaking. Almost all of its looks continue to be iconic. The second is The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, which not only won Best Costume Design, but Best Picture, and made a clean sweep of all 11 Oscars for which it was nominated.

Black Panther is paradigm-shifting in its own right, so I think it definitely has a chance to win not only best costume design, but best picture. If it does win for costuming, it will not only overcome the Academy’s love affair with period costume dramas, but its bias against films featuring non-Western costumes. Memoirs of a Geisha is the only recent winner that featured mostly non-Western costumes, and even then most of the men wear Western-style suits throughout the movie. Black Panther definitely takes some cues from Western couture, but its main influences, not to mention its materials, are overwhelmingly African.

Black Panther has a lot of hurdles to overcome if it wants to win this category (and I didn’t even get in to how it’s a superhero film), but it’s the clear winner. Let’s just hope the Academy figures that out.

It’s that time of year again! All the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are busy watching and judging this year’s Oscar-nominated films and performances. Most films considered serious Oscar contenders are released between October and December of the preceding year, presumably so they’ll be fresh in everyone’s minds when nominees are being whittled down.

Because of this, a lot of films haven’t made it to DVD yet, so everything we want to purchase for our media collection is out of our reach, for the time being at least. Still, we’re celebrating the movie industry’s biggest night with our own Oscar’s contest. AU community members can fill out their own ballots here, and watch the nominated films in our collection between now and February 24^th. Whoever predicts the most winners will win a 3D printed Oscar statuette from the AU Library’s Makerspace!

Here’s a list of current nominees in our collection:

• A Quiet Place (DVD 16021)
• Black Panther (DVD 16090)
• First Reformed (DVD 16162)
• Isle of the Dogs (DVD 16077)
• RBG (DVD 16120)

And if those aren’t enough for you, take a look at some of the past nominees and winners in our collection, including:

• Moonlight (DVD 13759)
• Call Me By Your Name (DVD 15322)
• Hidden Figures (DVD 13951)
• The Big Short (DVD 13094)
• The Hurt Locker (DVD 6762)
• Lion (DVD 13992)
• 12 Years a Slave (DVD 11176)
• Toy Story 3 (DVD 7770)
• The Artist (DVD 10193)
• La La Land (DVD 13991)

Keep an eyes on this blog between now and February 24th. We have a lot more Oscars-related content coming your way!