In a spectacular ceremony, typical of the annual Oscars, Birdman, a movie about an actor trying to redeem himself after playing a superhero onscreen by attempting a serious stage play, won the overall best film at the awards show, Sunday night.
The event held at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, Los Angeles, United States.
At Saturday’s Film Independent Spirit Awards, Birdman was also named best film.
“I don’t know how that happened,” Alejandro Inarritu, the movie’s Mexico-born director, said as the winning film team gathered around the mic, but the movie’s star, Michael Keaton, gave the credit all to Inarritu, saying, “this guy is as bold as bold can be.”
It was a night full of stirring political speeches, and before Inarritu surrendered the stage, he dedicated his award to his fellow Mexicans. The director said he hoped that the Mexicans living in Mexico “find and build a government that they deserve” and that those Mexicans who have come to the U.S. find “respect and dignity.”
Just moments earlier, Inarritu picked up the best director award, and he jubilantly confessed that as a good-luck charm, he was wearing the tighty whities Keaton wore in the film: “They are tight, they smell like balls,” he laughed.
And Inarritu had gotten his first call to come to the stage just minutes before that, when Birdman got the Oscar for best original screenplay. He wrote the film with his three screenwriting partners Nicolas Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris Jr. and Armando Bo. Inarritu recalled how three years ago, he asked them all “to follow [him] in a crazy idea, [and] because they are crazy, they did.”
But while Fox Searchlight’s Birdman took four key Oscars, the wealth was spread around. In fact, all eight best picture nominees got at least one Oscar, albeit not necessarily the ones each was looking for. Searchlight’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, which also collected four Oscars, proved to be popular in the craft categories, as was Sony Pictures Classic’s Whiplash, which picked up three Oscars.
An exuberant Eddie Redmayne delighted in receiving his first Oscar for portraying Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything. “I don’t think I’m capable of articulating what I am feeling right now. I’m fully aware that I’m a lucky, lucky man,” he said, before going on to testify that “this Oscar belongs to all of those people around the world battling ALS,” the disease with which Hawking has lived throughout his life. “I will be its custodian,” Redmayne promised.
ALS also was referenced in Julianne Moore’s acceptance speech as best actress for playing a woman with early-onset Alzheimer’s in Still Alice. She spoke of how people with Alzheimer’s “deserve to be seen so we can find a cure,” and she also explained that when the movie’s two directors, Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, found out in 2011 that Glatzer had been diagnosed with ALS, Glatzer told Westmoreland that what he really wanted to do with his life was continue to make movies.
Two movies about crisis hotlines won the short film awards. For live-action short, the winner was The Phone Call, from Mat Kirkby and James Lucas, in which Sally Hawkins plays a crisis-hotline counselor. For documentary short, the winner was Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1, from Ellen Goosenberg Kent and Dana Perry, about the suicide hotline dedicated exclusively to U.S. veterans.
Academy president Cheryl Boone Isaacs used her ceremonial appearance to do more than just welcome the guests, delivering a rousing call for the motion picture industry to accept its “responsibility to protect freedom of expression around the world.”
Host Neil Patrick Harris kicked off the proceedings at the Dolby Theatre with a musical number, “Moving Pictures,” written by the Oscar-winning Frozen team of Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez, that used a lot of multimedia razzle-dazzle to put him in the middle of famous motion picture scenes. He was joined by both Anna Kendrick and Jack Black, who contributed to the Gilbert-and-Sullivan-like patter.
