Oscars 2015: 10 things we learned

Liberal Hollywood is alive and kicking

It wasn’t quite Sacheen Littlefeather, but a rolling tide of firebrand speeches showed there’s life in the Hollywood dog yet.

The evening opened with Reese Witherspoon backing the #AskHerMore campaign, posting a message to her 1.9m followers on Instagram to encourage red carpet interviewers to do a less-sexist job. And it worked! They did indeed quiz her about more than just her frock. Shame, then, that she posted this a couple of hours later anyway.

Best supporting actress winner Patricia Arquette used her 90-second spot to big up “ecological sanitation” and equal pay for women – which went down especially well with Meryl Streep.

But she, too, numbed the effect by later telling the press room that minorities must stand up and fight for white women:

It’s time for all the women in America, and all the men that love women and all the gay people and all the people of colour that we’ve all fought for, to fight for us now.

Meanwhile the Citizenfour lot reminded the world we’re all being watched, all the time, and Imitation Game screenwriter Graham Moore delivered a passionate diatribe on teen awkwardness and suicide. His speech echoed that of documentary short winner Dana Perry, who dedicated the prize to her son, who had taken his own life.

But the hands-down winners of the most emotive speech prize were Common and John Legend, who picked up best song for Selma’s Glory. Here it is in full – have a read and see if you don’t do an Oyelowo.

Common

First I would like to thank God, that lives in us all. Recently, John and I got to go to Selma and perform Glory on the same bridge that Dr King and the people of the civil rights movement marched on, 50 years ago. This bridge was once a landmark of a divided nation, but now is a symbol for change. The spirit of this bridge transcends race, gender, religion, sexual orientation and social status. The spirit of this bridge connects the kid from the south side of Chicago, dreaming of a better life, to those in France standing up for their freedom of expression, to the people in Hong Kong protesting for democracy. This bridge was built on hope, welded with compassion and elevated by love for all human beings.

John Legend

Thank you. Nina Simone said it’s an artist’s duty to reflect the times in which we live. We wrote this song for a film that was based on events 50 years ago, but we say that Selma is now. Because the struggle for justice is right now. We know that the Voting Rights Act that they fought for 50 years ago is being compromised right now in this country today. We know that right now, the struggle for freedom and justice is real. We live in the most incarcerated country in the world. There are more black men under correctional control today than were under slavery in 1850. When people are marching with our song, we want to tell you we are with you, we see you, we love you, and march on. God bless you.

#OscarsStillSoWhite

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Welcome to the 87th Oscars. Tonight we honor Hollywood’s best and whitest — sorry, brightest.

So said new host Neil Patrick Harris at the very start of this year’s. A well-intentioned attempt to tackle head-on the key controversy, but despite a few high-profile wins and unabashed frankness, #OscarsSoWhite still emerged as the dominant hashtag on social media.

And while some accused the producers of cosmetic changes …

Others failed to spot a lot of positive action …

On the red carpet, too, it was 50 shades of pale

From Marion Cotillard’s bum-strap Dior dress to Lupita Nyong’o’s Calvin Klein pearl shower, pale dresses dominated this year. Even the men were at it – Jared Leto wore a pale lilac suit and white shoes under his brolly and Cumberbatch wore white.

The success rate of the shade varied wildly. Those who qualified for the pale and sartorially interesting included Cotillard, whose dress worked mainly from the back, and Carmen Ejogo, whose sequin slip gown was almost blasé in its simplicity. But there was some wardrobe pale ail too. Julianne Moore’s Chanel was woefully drippy, Jennifer Aniston’s mermaid Versace was stale as five-day-old bread and Kerry Washington wore maid-of-honour chic. There were some notable exceptions to the pale rule: Dakota Johnson was on fire in Saint Laurent and Nicole Kidman wore a slice of Louis Vuitton sequins with a ketchup-coloured belt.

But it was Anna Wintour who confirmed the wishy-washy theme. The Vogue editor-in-chief is the undisputed boss of fashion in the whole world and she doesn’t routinely attend the Oscars. But this year Wintour played hooky from London fashion week and showed up in LA in a very pale rose dress. And you contradict Wintour at your peril.

You owe everything to your parents

“Call your mom, everybody. Call your dad. If you’re lucky enough to have a parent or two alive on this planet, call em. Don’t text, don’t email – call them.”

JK Simmons’s strict instructions were echoed by shout-outs to parents by short film winners Mat Kirkby and James Lucas, Julianne Moore and Paweł Pawlikowski.

What boxes did other key speeches tick? Check out our handy matrix:

The Oscars orchestra is no longer a force to be reckoned with

They used to be the most terrifying in the business. Overstay your allotted acceptance speech slot by so much as a second, and up they’d start with a screeching musical theme designed to both drown you out and drive you off the stage. I know your agent’s third cousin really wanted to hear their name, but the Oscar show producers run a tight ship, yes-sir-Bob.

This year, though, the orchestra just lost its aura. No one was scared. They just talked through it and over it. Paweł Pawlikowski, winner of the best foreign language film Oscar for Ida, shouted messages to his Polish crew, his kids, his late wife; the band just gave up.

British short film winners Mat Kirkby and James Lucas also paid no heed.

Occasionally the band got their mojo back and managed to shepherd the winners off before their time (we’re looking at you, Big Hero 6) but – definitively, the orchestra’s power is dead.

It’s hard to tell the difference between our Oscars bingo board and a crystal ball

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We invited you to play along with our Oscars bingo game – in which we anticipated some smart aleck conjuring a parody Twitter account based on a dress, accessory or body part. And sure enough ...

Plus! Michael Keaton’s chewing gum, Lady Gaga’s gloves, Chris Pine’s tears, Travolta’s toupee and (no doubt) more.

Grease is definitely the word

Having gone down in Oscars infamy last year after introducing Idina Menzel – who won best song for Frozen’s Let It Go – as Adele Dazeem, John Travolta was back for more this year. This time, the actor was in uncomfortably touchy-feely form. First he sidled up behind Scarlett Johansson as she posed on the red carpet, kissed her, and slid his hand around her waist.

During the ceremony, when Travolta presented the best song award with Menzel (who got her revenge by introducing him as Glom Gazingo), he ickily caressed her face. As one critic said on Twitter, referring to best adapted screenplay winner Graham Moore’s speech: “Stay weird. Unless you are John Travolta, in which case please be less weird.”

The producers still can’t work out how to get down with the kids

When it comes to attracting a fickle younger audience, it seemed as if last year, the Academy had finally got the formula right. Ellen’s selfie was a stroke of Twitter-breaking genius and the ratings were the highest since 2000. But this year, something felt out of place. A stellar line-up of musical guests, from Rita Ora to Adam Levine, led to a collective “meh” while the much-touted Lady Gaga number was boringly conservative.

You might have expected a pop star known for shows in which she has someone vomit paint on to the stage to come up with something similarly over the top for a live rendition of The Sound of Music. But Gaga chose to take the traditional route. Tackling the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical’s big numbers (including My Favourite Things, Edelweiss and Climb Every Mountain), she went for restrained minimalism, focusing on her vocal performance rather than any auxiliary bells and whistles. Julie Andrews, appearing afterwards to present the award for best score, 50 years after the movie of The Sound of Music won best picture, looked genuinely touched by the performance, the standout musical moment of the night.

It might have led to the most tweets per minute of the night but with her 44.5 million followers on Twitter, you could argue that anything she might have done would have created an equally big stir. Neil Patrick Harris’s promise to top last year’s celeb selfie was, well, seemingly non-existent, while his big stunt (replicating a scene from Birdman) felt like old-school Billy Crystal. A lack of intentionally “viral” moments and a disappointingly safe run of jokes gave the ceremony little of the vibrancy it so desperately hoped for. Back to the drawing board once again.

The Mexicans are coming!

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Alfonso Cuarón won the best director Oscar last year for Gravity, becoming the first Mexican ever to do so. But now it’s happened, perhaps it will simply continue to happen, for ever and ever. For this time round, Alejandro González Iñárritu picked up the same award for Birdman. The cinematography prize both years went to fellow Mexican Emmanuel Lubezi. Carlos Reygadas, your time is nigh.

Deep down, the Oscars are all about sharing

It’s always fun when something massive comes along and sweeps the board, giving everything else a thoroughly good kicking – think Titanic, The Silence of the Lambs, or Lord of the Rings. There’s a sort of deranged, gluttonous feeling, a perverse glee in seeing so many dreams trampled on by a massive cultural juggernaut.

But as the above films suggest, big winners don’t tend to age well – in fact, their glory sets them up for a fall. Much better all round to have a nice broad spread of winners. There’s no grotesque anointment of something that can’t possibly be as good as the Academy claims it is, and it probably makes for a better mood around the punch at the Vanity Fair party.

This year was one of the latter occasions. True, Birdman did better than expected, but all the nominees in the best film category won at least one award. This was an Oscars that Cilla Black would have been proud of, where no-one went home empty-handed.

This happened before, in 2013, and seems to be part of a wider trend. With streaming culture opening our tastes up to a wider range of film-making, both the Academy and ordinary cinemagoers are less likely to rally around a big cultural moment. Instead, we’re all splitting our votes, and that’s surely a much healthier environment for making art that speaks to everyone.