So a perfectly decent, unexceptional and interesting list of Oscar winners has been topped off with a frustrating anti-climax. And the evening suffered from a very uncertain host performance from poor Neil Patrick Harris, who never seemed sure if he was going to be an old-fashioned showtune guy or a real standup comic. He remained amiable and likable, but died a slow death, with an absence of laughs. He had nothing like the energy or pizzazz of Ellen DeGeneres last year, with her web-smashing selfie, or indeed Tina Fey and Amy Poehler at the Golden Globes. My colleague Stuart Heritage called this event the American Eurovision, and that about sums up its weird directionless kitschiness.
Oscars 2015: the funniest moments from Neil Patrick Harris to John Travolta’s face-grabbingThe Academy had already come close to disgracing itself by snubbing Ava DuVernay and David Oyelowo from Selma, the film about Martin Luther King. Now it has further failed to distinguish itself with something that is almost another snub — failing to give the best picture award to Richard Linklater’s marvellous Boyhood. It had the chance to mark out a real classic, and in so doing reinforce the Oscar’s own brand-value. But no. The best supporting actress Oscar went to Patricia Arquette as the boy’s mother, a just reward for a passionate performance and a tremendous key closing scene. But that was it. The Academy withheld the best picture prize at the last moment and gave it to Birdman, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, having already given the best director prize to Iñárritu, as well giving the film best cinematography and best original screenplay. At the risk of being churlish, it seems like the wrong choice to me.
That said, Birdman is certainly a wonderful movie. This fantasia of midlife showbusiness status-anxiety was very original, though with a broad touch of Mel Brooks and The Producers. It is superbly shot, excitingly staged and hilariously acted. Michael Keaton was lovely in the role. His face, though crumpled and creased with disappointment and middle age, always looked heartwrenchingly boyish. There was agony in that face – and a terrible black-comic hope that his whole life would be redeemed by success. Great stuff, and great stuff from Naomi Watts, Ed Norton, Emma Stone and Andrea Riseborough. Watching Birdman was like knocking back a vodka-and-tonic. Exciting, brilliant film-making. But Boyhood was better: deeper and more substantial.
Both the lead acting prizes went to characters with disabilities, but despite the industry cliches involved here, these were both very well deserved. Julianne Moore was almost scarily plausible as someone who instinctively knows how to modify the vague or patrician mannerisms of a lauded university teacher to cover up her growing dementia. I worry that the movie itself was a bit flat, compared to the quality of its central performance. But arguably it is deliberately that way, downplayed, in order better to showcase Moore’s presence. So kudos is also due to this movie’s smart young British producer, Lex Lutzus.
Oscar nominees on the red carpetEddie Redmayne did himself proud – and did Working Title proud – with his award-winning run in the role of Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything. He very plausibly represented Hawking’s physical decline and intelligently represented the enigma of Hawking’s attitude to his marriage as it both collapsed, and yet in some other more enigmatic way survived, both as friendship and professional alliance. He is an actor who has matured hugely from the beautiful-boy roles that marked the earlier part of his career: he seized the role and made it his own. What a triumph this film has been for him.
JK Simmons was the much-predicted best supporting actor Oscar-winner, playing the terrifying music teacher in Whiplash, and his speech had the more experienced actor’s good-natured level-headedness. He always has given the impression that he is someone who is equally unimpressed with what Kipling called the impostors of victory and defeat. His Oscar was a feelgood moment.
The Imitation Game did not come away empty-handed: an Oscar for Graham Moore for best adapted screenplay. That prize was a bit of an outlier. The movie was reasonably scripted and the fact that it held and entertained so many audiences (as it undoubtedly has done) is a tribute to Moore. But the film itself was remarkable more for its accomplished and studied performance from Benedict Cumberbatch than for anything else.
Ida wins best foreign language OscarElsewhere, there were throughly admirable awards for Paweł Pawlikowski’s Ida as best foreign film and Laura Poitras’s Citizenfour as best documentary — and Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel had something for the silverware cabinet for its design qualities.
But again, I come back to the Boyhood snub. Is it too much to call it Boyhoodgate? What happened? This great film has somehow been given a swerve. It’s baffling. But congratulations are due to Iñárritu, a brilliant and original film-maker for creating Birdman, a movie which took flight at the 2015 Oscars.
