The Oscars have long had surprising moments, but Sunday night just gave us the most insane moment in Academy Awards history. Moonlight won Best Picture, but only after presenters Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway mistakenly named La La Land the winner.
Ah, can you smell it? The aroma of scorching hot awards season debates is already in the air! The nominees for the 2017 Oscars were announced bright and early this morning – or should we say dark and early, as the ScreenCrush team beat the sunrise for the big announcement.
An “October surprise” refers to a major revelation deliberately timed to influence the outcome of a Presidential election. The Oscars, then, regularly offer a January surprise, in which a contender comes out of nowhere to elbow their way into the awards conversation. This year’s big shock is permanently smirking superhero send-up Deadpool, which has already upended plenty of predictions by racking up nominations among various industry guild groups. Superhero movies have never been able to crack the Best Picture race, but perhaps the self-reflexive meta streak in Deadpool could give it the edge it needs to sneak into the category. The nominations will be announced one week from today, and who’ll end up at the big dance is anyone’s guess.
It’s been a topsy-turvy week for awards prognosticators, relative even to the usual topsy-turviness of an industry based entirely on guesswork and speculation. Deadpool frightened and confused Oscar oddsmakers when it unexpectedly snatched up a Best Picture nomination from the Producers Guild Awards program on Tuesday, and then officially rejiggered everyone’s slate of predictions when director Tim Miller earned a nomination from the Directors Guild of America. What had been all but forgotten as a superhero oddball is staging a late-phase charge among the groups of professionals that vote for Oscar nominees — nothing is out of the question.
Ready or not, awards season has arrived, which means you’ll hear be hearing nothing but Oscars talk for the next two months. The awards season is already a big question mark for a few frontrunners. Earlier this week Moonlight swept the Gotham Awards, Manchester By the Sea dominated the National Board of Review’s winners list, and La La Land earned 12 noms for the Critics’ Choice Awards. It’s safe to say this will be a very competitive Oscar season, and lucky for you ScreenCrush has a brand new podcast to keep you up to date on all the awards season news.
The LEGO Movie may not have been nominated for Best Animated Feature at the 2015 Oscars, but one of the highlights of the show was still the performance of “Everything is Awesome” by The Lonely Island with Tegan & Sara. During the song, dancers from the stage came down into the audience and handed out LEGO Oscar trophies to Emma Stone, Steve Carell, Channing Tatum and Oprah, who was really excited.
For many viewers, the Oscars are are chance to snark and make fun of everything that happens on stage (and can you blame ‘em?). But then the “In Memoriam” segment comes around and reduces even the most cynical person to puddle of bubbling tears. The 2015 Oscars “In Memoriam” is no different, offering a whirlwind tour through a year’s worth of beloved people who passed away. Get ready ... it’s about to get a little dusty in here.
Every year, when the Oscar nominations are announced, a considerable amount of time is spent debating who was snubbed. But for every film that was expecting to get nominated and didn't, there's a film that no one was expecting to get nominated and did. This is the story of those films. The movies you'll look back on and wonder exactly how the heck it ever got nominated for an Oscar.
The morning of the Oscar nominations is a stressful time; we can certainly attest to that. Everything is happening so quickly and there are a lot of strange names to spell and pronounce and you have to do it really quickly. Tell it to Cheryl Boone Isaacs, president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, who accidentally announced "Dick Poop" as an Oscar nominee this morning.
Well, that was interesting. Just when you think you've got the Oscars figured out, they throw you a huge curve ball. Or, maybe what's so surprising about this year's nominations is how nothing is really different?