SPOTLIGHT SHINES ON A NIGHT OF SHOCKS: THE 88TH ANNUAL ACADEMY AWARDS

Nobody thought it was possible: win the Best Picture Oscar with only one other win? And at that, the first award of the night? Half way through, it looked like even The Revenant wasn't going to be able to pull off the big win, as its tally was being depleted by an astonishing surge by Mad Max: Fury Road - six wins for George Miller's film! The later awards favoured Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's western, however, and indeed both he and Leonardo DiCaprio won their expected trophies. But the gasps and cheers that greeted Morgan Freeman's announcement of Spotlight as the surprise Best Picture winner - and with only one other award won, Original Screenplay, to The Revenant's three and Mad Max's six - were confirmation: not only was this our Best Picture winner for 2015, it was also our most surprising winner since 2005's Crash, after our most unpredictable race in who knows how long.
     And there were even bigger shocks in other categories: Sylvester Stallone's widely predicted victory in Supporting Actor failed to materialise, as BAFTA champ Mark Rylance won instead. The Visual Effects award went to perhaps the most left-field winner in memory: Ex Machina, only the second time a Best Picture nominee has failed to win that award (when nominated) in history, and a choice utterly no-one had predicted. And Best Original Song went to 'Writing's on the Wall' from Spectre - the night's most reviled decision by a clear distance, and featuring the most mocked (and inaccurate) acceptance speech statement from singer Sam Smith, who claimed to be the first openly gay man to win an Oscar (he's not). Check out the nominations at this link, and grin gleefully over the award winners in full, below:

Best Picture

Spotlight (Blye Pagon Faust, Steve Golin, Nicole Rocklin and Michael Sugar)

Best Directing

Alejandro González Iñárritu (The Revenant)

Best Actor in a Leading Role

Leonardo DiCaprio (The Revenant)

Best Actress in a Leading Role

Brie Larson (Room)

Best Actor in a Supporting Role

Mark Rylance (Bridge of Spies)

Best Actress in a Supporting Role

Alicia Vikander (The Danish Girl)

Best Writing – Original Screenplay

Tom McCarthy and Josh Singer (Spotlight)

Best Writing – Adapted Screenplay

Adam McKay and Charles Randolph (The Big Short)

Best Cinematography

Emmanuel Lubezki (The Revenant)

Best Film Editing

Margaret Sixel (Mad Max: Fury Road)

Best Production Design

Colin Gibson and Lisa Thompson (Mad Max: Fury Road)

Best Costume Design

Jenny Beavan (Mad Max: Fury Road)

Best Sound Mixing

Chris Jenkins, Ben Osmo and Gregg Rudloff (Mad Max: Fury Road)

Best Sound Editing

Mark A. Mangini and David White (Mad Max: Fury Road)

Best Visual Effects

Mark Ardington, Sara Bennett, Paul Norris and Andrew Whitehurst (Ex Machina)

Best Makeup and Hairstyling

Damian Martin, Lesley Vanderwalt and Elka Wardega (Mad Max: Fury Road)

Best Music (Original Score)

Ennio Morricone (The Hateful Eight)

Best Music (Original Song)

Jimmy Napes and Sam Smith – ‘Writing’s on the Wall’ (Spectre)

Best Animated Feature Film

Inside Out (Pete Docter and Jonas Rivera)

Best Documentary Feature

Amy (James Gay-Rees and Asif Kapadia)

Best Foreign Language Film

Son of Saul – Hungary (Nemes László)

Best Short Film (Live Action)

Stutterer (Serena Armitage and Benjamin Cleary)

Best Short Film (Animated)

Bear Story (Pato Escala and Gabriel Osorio)

Best Documentary Short

A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness (Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy)

REVIEW OF 2015 - BEST VISUAL EFFECTS

1. Mad Max: Fury Road

2. The Walk

3. Star Wars: The Force Awakens

4. The Revenant

5. Avengers: Age of Ultron

6. Jupiter Ascending

7. Ex Machina

8. Spectre

9. Jurassic World

10. The Martian

PHOENIX FUCKS IT UP WITH THEIR 2015 FILM CRITICS SOCIETY NOMINATIONS

And here comes the Phoenix Film Critics Society to really brighten up your Christmas! Among the many odious details in their award nominations for the year: Carol secures one nomination, the same number as The Visit; The Danish Girl is declared a better film than Carol; not a single POC is nominated for an acting award, The Martian makes the top three for cinematography (over Carol and The Assassin); 'Writing's on the Wall' from Spectre is named one of the best three film songs of the year; The Look of Silence isn't even nominated for Best Documentary; The Walk is nominated for its ensemble, indicating that perhaps these voters didn't even see The Walk; fs will people stop claiming Alicia Vikander broke through with Ex Machina? Have they literally not even gotten out of bed for the last four years? Winners will be announced on the 22nd of December. The disaster in full below:

Best Picture

The Big Short

Bridge of Spies

Brooklyn

The Danish Girl

Inside Out

Mad Max: Fury Road

The Martian

The Revenant

Room

Spotlight

Best Director

Alejandro González Iñárritu (The Revenant)

Adam McKay (The Big Short)

Tom McCarthy (Spotlight)

George Miller (Mad Max: Fury Road)

Ridley Scott (The Martian)

Best Actor in a Leading Role

Bryan Cranston (Trumbo)

Matt Damon (The Martian)

Johnny Depp (Black Mass)

Leonardo DiCaprio (The Revenant)

Eddie Redmayne (The Danish Girl)

Best Actress in a Leading Role

Cate Blanchett (Carol)

Brie Larson (Room)

Jennifer Lawrence (Joy)

Saoirse Ronan (Brooklyn)

Charlize Theron (Mad Max: Fury Road)

Best Actor in a Supporting Role

Paul Dano (Love & Mercy)

Tom Hardy (The Revenant)

Mark Ruffalo (Spotlight)

Mark Rylance (Bridge of Spies)

Michael Shannon (99 Homes)

Best Actress in a Supporting Role

Rachel McAdams (Spotlight)

Helen Mirren (Trumbo)

Alicia Vikander (The Danish Girl)

Julie Walters (Brooklyn)

Kate Winslet (Steve Jobs)

Best Original Screenplay

Bridge of Spies

Ex Machina

Inside Out

Spotlight

Best Screenplay Adapted from Other Material

The Big Short

Brooklyn

The Martian

Room

Best Cinematography

Mad Max: Fury Road

The Martian

The Revenant

Best Film Editing

Mad Max: Fury Road

The Martian

Spotlight

Best Production Design

Brooklyn

The Danish Girl

Mad Max: Fury Road

Best Costume Design

Cinderella

The Danish Girl

Mad Max: Fury Road

Best Visual Effects

Jurassic World

Mad Max: Fury Road

The Martian

Best Original Score

Bridge of Spies

The Hateful Eight

The Revenant

Spotlight

Best Original Song

‘One Kind of Love’ (Love & Mercy)

‘See You Again’ (Furious 7)

‘Writing’s on the Wall’ (Spectre)

Best Ensemble Acting

The Big Short

The Hateful Eight

Spotlight

Trumbo

The Walk

Best Animated Film

Inside Out

The Peanuts Movie

Shaun the Sheep Movie

Best Documentary

Amy

He Named Me Malala

Where to Invade Next

Best Foreign Language Film

The Assassin

Mustang

Son of Saul

The Overlooked Film of the Year

Ex Machina

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

Z for Zachariah

Best Breakthrough Performance

Abraham Attah (Beasts of No Nation)

Jacob Tremblay (Room)

Alicia Vikander (Ex Machina)

Best Performance by a Youth

Abraham Attah (Beasts of No Nation)

Ed Oxenbould (The Visit)

Jacob Tremblay (Room)

REVIEW - SPECTRE (SAM MENDES)

'The dead are alive' proclaims Sam Mendes' Spectre, the 24th official James Bond film in which the preceding 23 seem to rise from the graveyard of history and reassert themselves. Spectre is like a grand resurrection, and fitting too, given the film's foreboding tone and overall obsession with death. Bond is torn down on this tour of his past, both personal and cinematic, emotionally and physically pulverised as any one of many buildings whose crumbling demises are captured here. There's the constant threat that the same might happen to our hero, though it's more a tease than a threat. In similar spirit, Spectre is unexpectedly enjoyable, shot through with lightness and humour, even in its most intense of action sequences. The throwback style supplies the charm, its application - suggesting the culmination of a career - supplies the dread, and the former somewhat undercuts the latter by the end, as Spectre eventually amounts to rather less than it promises to be. It's slickly made, with powerful and purposeful action and excellent tech creds, but the constant revisiting contributes to a feeling that we've seen all this before. Even the plot is modelled on too many old Bond films, with every twist and turn signposted if not by obvious foreshadowing than by our expectations. But if those expectations are met, then so too are all of our expectations, from the negative - a regressive stance on gender politics, not least in light of more recent Bond films - to the positive - rich, grainy cinematography by Hoyte van Hoytema, blistering sound design and a much-improved score by Thomas Newman.