"Argo" won Best Picture at the 85th
Academy Awards on Sunday.
The true story of the C.I.A.'s heroic efforts to extricate a group of U.S.
diplomats from revolutionary Iran nabbed the evening's biggest prize despite the
fact that Ben Affleck failed to score a Best
Director Oscar nomination.
"Argo" earned three awards, including ones for its script and editing, in a
show that stretched over three hours and thirty minutes and spread its top
prizes fairly evenly among the major contenders.
The excessive length of the show, which sagged under the weight of several
movie tributes and musical performances, became a frequent punch line as the
hours ticked by. Host Seth MacFarlane joked that the
program would go right into the 2014 Oscars and also quipped that 86-year old
Best Actress nominee Emmanuelle Riva was nine when the
show started.
Daniel Day-Lewis and Jennifer Lawrence won top acting
prizes at the ceremony. Day-Lewis became the first person to ever win three Best
Actor prizes, picking up his latest statue for channeling Abraham Lincoln in
"Lincoln."
"Three years ago before we decided to do a straight swap, I'd actually been
committed to play Margaret Thatcher," Day-Lewis joked, after accepting his award
from Meryl Streep, who won the Best
Actress prize last year for "The Iron Lady."
"Lincoln," which initially seemed to be a juggernaut, commanding a leading 12
Oscar nominations, was largely shut out of the awards. Besides Day-Lewis'
victory, it scored only one other award for production design.
Lawrence earned a Best Actress Oscar for her performance as a grieving widow
in "Silver Linings Playbook." The visibly stunned actress thanked her fellow
actresses, pausing to wish fellow nominee Emmanuelle Riva ("Amour") a happy birthday.
Hathaway earned her statue for playing Fantine, a poverty-stricken mother
forced into prostitution in "Les Misérables," while Waltz won the
Best Supporting Actor statue for his performance as a charming bounty hunter in
"Django Unchained."
"It came true," Hathaway said, while clasping her statue.
She went on to say that she hoped that one day the hardships of characters
like Fantine would only be found in stories.
In his speech, Waltz thanked his director Quentin Tarantino and fellow
nominees.
"I was on a list with the greatest actors around," Waltz said backstage in
the press room. "How do you think someone feels when all of a sudden his name is
called in that context?"
"Amour," from Austrian director Michael Haneke, captured Best Foreign
Language Film, for its searing depiction of an elderly couple struggling to cope
with the ravages of old age.
In his speech, Haneke thanked stars Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle
Riva, two legends of foreign language cinema, saying that he never would have
been on the stage had it not been for their performances.
Adele now has an Oscar to go along
with her trophy case full of Grammys. The British chanteuse earned an Academy
Award for her sultry theme song to "Skyfall," which is the first James
Bond movie to earn a Best Song Oscar, despite decades of memorable movie music
from everyone from Paul McCartney to Carly Simon.
Chris Terrio earned an Oscar for Best
Adapted Screenplay for "Argo," for bringing two accounts of the daring C.I.A.
mission to the screen, while Tarantino won his second Oscar for Best Original
Screenplay with his antebellum revenge fantasy "Django Unchained."
"I have to cast the right people to make those characters come alive...and
boy this time did I do it," Tarantino said, while thanking his cast.
MacFarlane kicked off the 85th Academy Awards by saying that he only got the
hosting gig after everyone from Whoopi Goldberg to Ron Jeremy refused
the job.
"And the quest to make Tommy Lee Jones laugh begins now, "
MacFarlane said.
The "Family Guy" creator sent up Hollywood self-aggrandizement, poking fun at
the Academy's failure to nominate Ben Affleck and Jean Dujardin's limited
English language skills (joking that "The Artist" star couldn't make it in
talkies).
There was even a cameo from William Shatner in full James T. Kirk
gear from "Star Trek" and a song about actresses who have been naked on film,
called "we saw your boobs."
As promised, music factored heavily into the 2013 edition of the Oscars. In
addition to MacFarlane's showmanship, there was also a tribute to James Bond's
50 years in films, featuring Dame Shirley Bassey singing the theme from
"Goldfinger." Bassey's rendition of the classic 007 anthem brought the crowd at
the Dolby Theatre to their feet.
Bassey wasn't the only diva in the house. The ceremony also included a rare
appearance by Barbra Streisand, who sang the theme
from "The Way We Were" during the show's "In Memoriam" segment, which recognizes
members of the industry who died during the last year -- a group that includes
the composer of that ballad, Marvin Hamlisch.
For good measure, there was also a tribute to movie musicals of the past
decade featuring performances from the cast of "Les Misérables," Jennifer Hudson of "Dreamgirls" and Catherine Zeta-Jones representing "Chicago."
Disney dominated the animation awards, picking up Best Animated Feature for
"Brave" and Best Animated Short Film for
"Paperman."
"Searching for Sugar Man," the story of a musician's amazing second act,
earned the award for Best Documentary" over intense competition from the likes
of "How to Survive a Plague" and "The Invisible War." Rodriguez, the American
musician rescued from obscurity by the film, was not in attendance, because the
movie's producers said he did not want to distract from the documentary's big
night.
The night's technical categories produced that rarest of Oscar occurrences --
a tie. In the Sound Editing category, both "Zero Dark Thirty" and "Skyfall"
earned statues for capturing the explosions, gunfire and other scenes of finely
calibrated mayhem.
"Life of Pi" performed strongly in below-the-line categories, earning prizes
for its cinematography, score and effects work.
A team from Rhythm & Hues picked up a statue for their work designing
visual effects for the film. The win was an especially poignant one for Rhythm
& Hues because it filed for bankruptcy protection this month.
Bill Westenhofer, a member of the effects team, tried to pay tribute to the
company, but was ushered off the stage as the orchestra began playing. Back
stage, he was able to speak in more depth about the financial troubles the
befell not just Rhythm & Hues, but the visual effects industry in
Calfornia.
"We're not technicians...we're artists, and if we don't do something to
change the business model, we might lose some of the artistry," Westenhofer
said.
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