Each week before the Oscars, Guardian film reviewer Tom Shone predicted the winners at this year’s Academy Awards. Today we find out: how did he do?
First, the good news. If you simply copied out my final Oscars ballot then – woo-hoo! – you got 22 out of 24 categories right and probably won your Oscars pool.
The only two I got wrong were best animated short, which I had going to Disney’s Get a Horse! and which went to Mr Hublot, a Pixaresque story of a robot and his dog, and best editing, which went not to Captain Phillips’s Chris Rouse but added to Alfonso Cuarón’s haul for Gravity.
The soft-spoken Mexican director can have few complaints about the way the evening went, what with his film taking home seven Oscars, but the lack of heat generated by his film in the writing and acting races added up. Gravity is a virtually a solo-performance film – for Sandra Bullock not really to have been in the conversation for best actress amounted to too big a hole in its profile.
Instead, as I thought it would, best picture went to Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, with McQueen performing a winner’s jump that bespoke a childlike exuberance normally absent from his shy and slightly maladroit demeanour. (Did you see the way he shrank from host Ellen DeGeneres when she advanced down the aisle next to him? She saw it, too. For a second I thought he might actually flee.)
The Guardian’s Catherine Shoard can take the bragging rights on this one; just as Roger Ebert called last year’s race for Argo in September 2012, Shoard put the backs of the collected Oscar bloggerati up by calling this year’s race in September 2013, when she observed after seeing the film at Toronto that “the notion that 12 Years a Slave won’t win the best picture Oscar seems absurd to those who’ve seen it”.
The key phrase here is “to those who’ve seen it”. In the final days of the race, the news that academy members were still finding excuses not to watch McQueen’s film (“At 5 o’clock tonight I’m gonna watch Going My Way on TCM. That’s my kind of a movie”) added a much needed dose to fear into a race that, for all the chatter about how “competitive”, “unpredictable” and “exciting” it was, probably departed less from a script established in the early fall than most.
We had our best picture, and knew it, in September. We had our best actress winner, and knew it, in July. We had our best director, and knew it, in October.
The age of the “upset” would appear to be gone. That’s the bad news. In our web-driven, Twitter-fast film culture, it is apparently entirely possible for the world to predict what the 6,000 poor lemmings who make up the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are going to do.
Or so I felt, until, two hours into a show padded with visual-effects technicians thanking each other’s families, Lupita Nyong’o took to the stage and spoke so graciously, thrillingly and movingly about the paradox of playing Patsey in 12 Years a Slave – “It doesn’t escape me for one moment that so much joy in my life is thanks to so much pain in someone else’s” – that for a few seconds the entire world, or a 40-million-sized chunk of it, seemed to hold its breath.
Steve McQueen clasped his hands together, his face an expression of undiluted joy. Ellen was nowhere near. The night belonged to Lupita.
First, the good news. If you simply copied out my final Oscars ballot then – woo-hoo! – you got 22 out of 24 categories right and probably won your Oscars pool.
The only two I got wrong were best animated short, which I had going to Disney’s Get a Horse! and which went to Mr Hublot, a Pixaresque story of a robot and his dog, and best editing, which went not to Captain Phillips’s Chris Rouse but added to Alfonso Cuarón’s haul for Gravity.
The soft-spoken Mexican director can have few complaints about the way the evening went, what with his film taking home seven Oscars, but the lack of heat generated by his film in the writing and acting races added up. Gravity is a virtually a solo-performance film – for Sandra Bullock not really to have been in the conversation for best actress amounted to too big a hole in its profile.
Instead, as I thought it would, best picture went to Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, with McQueen performing a winner’s jump that bespoke a childlike exuberance normally absent from his shy and slightly maladroit demeanour. (Did you see the way he shrank from host Ellen DeGeneres when she advanced down the aisle next to him? She saw it, too. For a second I thought he might actually flee.)
The Guardian’s Catherine Shoard can take the bragging rights on this one; just as Roger Ebert called last year’s race for Argo in September 2012, Shoard put the backs of the collected Oscar bloggerati up by calling this year’s race in September 2013, when she observed after seeing the film at Toronto that “the notion that 12 Years a Slave won’t win the best picture Oscar seems absurd to those who’ve seen it”.
The key phrase here is “to those who’ve seen it”. In the final days of the race, the news that academy members were still finding excuses not to watch McQueen’s film (“At 5 o’clock tonight I’m gonna watch Going My Way on TCM. That’s my kind of a movie”) added a much needed dose to fear into a race that, for all the chatter about how “competitive”, “unpredictable” and “exciting” it was, probably departed less from a script established in the early fall than most.
We had our best picture, and knew it, in September. We had our best actress winner, and knew it, in July. We had our best director, and knew it, in October.
The age of the “upset” would appear to be gone. That’s the bad news. In our web-driven, Twitter-fast film culture, it is apparently entirely possible for the world to predict what the 6,000 poor lemmings who make up the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are going to do.
Or so I felt, until, two hours into a show padded with visual-effects technicians thanking each other’s families, Lupita Nyong’o took to the stage and spoke so graciously, thrillingly and movingly about the paradox of playing Patsey in 12 Years a Slave – “It doesn’t escape me for one moment that so much joy in my life is thanks to so much pain in someone else’s” – that for a few seconds the entire world, or a 40-million-sized chunk of it, seemed to hold its breath.
Steve McQueen clasped his hands together, his face an expression of undiluted joy. Ellen was nowhere near. The night belonged to Lupita.
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