Best Makeup & Hair-styling

The Grand Budapest Hotel started racking up the wins early on with their shoo-in win for Best Costume Design and a more surprising win for Best Makeup and Hair-styling. The transformations in Budapest, were fine, sure, but it doesn’t quite live up to the other nominees in my opinion. Guardians of the Galaxy should have taken this one by a light year for the intricate makeup work.

Best Foreign Language Film

This bothers me only because I should have seen it coming. I pick Ida for the Golden Globe and it loses. So I pick Leviathan for the Oscar and it loses. Ida was a great film and totally deserved it. I’m just disappointed in my flip-flop. The golden rule of the Best Foreign Film Oscar: if one of the nominees is nominated in a different category, it automatically wins for Best Foreign Film, because it is rare for the Academy to honor feature films from outside of Hollywood.

 

The Numerous Shots of Michael Keaton chewing gum

It just got to me.

 

Best Sound Mixing

It’s great to see Whiplash get some much-deserved love. I was fairly certain American Sniper would take this one, but I’m glad that it didn’t. Whiplash was fantastic (read a full review of Whiplash here).

 

Patricia Arquette’s Acceptance Speech

Arquette won for Best Supporting Actress for her role in Boyhood. She deserved it, and used her time on stage as a platform to say that women everywhere deserve more. It was an empowering speech that had the room (most notably Meryl Streep and J. Lo) roaring.

 

Guardian’s of the Galaxy snubs

The film lost in makeup and visual effects, two categories in which it excelled. Both were tight categories, but, as I already stated, I thought that it would at the very least secure makeup and hair-styling.

 

Tom Cross wins for Best Editing

Even more unexpected love for Whiplash. Despite it’s masterful editing, I couldn’t see it beating out American Sniper and Boyhood. Congratulations, Mr. Cross.

 

Terrence Howard goes off script for The Imitation Game

He really loves this movie. I did not see that coming.

 

Common and John Legend bring people to tears

Sometimes the original song performances  can come off as filler. But not when Common and John Legend belted out “Glory.” David Oyelowo, Chris Pine, and many others in the audience were weeping at the end of this powerful song. It came as no surprise when, moments later, the duo won the statue for Best Original Song. This was accompanied by an eloquent speech from both of the winners. The whole package was a huge highlight of the night that was only slightly squandered by the awkward Idina Menzel-John Travolta reunion.

 

Lady Gaga delivers a great Sound of Music tribute

It sounds like a weird choice to have Lady Gaga do her best Julie Andrews, but it worked. It was a pleasantly surprising number.

 

Desplat wins for Best Score

Alexandre Desplat is a wonderful composer, certainly, and it isn’t a major upset that he won this year. However, the Golden Globe winning score that Johann Johannsson crafted for The Theory of Everything was magnificent, and I personally would have liked to see him get recognized by the Academy.

 

Graham Moore’s Awesome Acceptance Speech

The speeches this year definitely cover all the bases of social awareness: from Arquette preaching for gender equality, to Common and John Legend talking about the abhorrent racial discrimination that continues to be a national problem, to J.K. Simmons simply suggesting that we all call our parents every once in a while. Moore continued this trend, talking about his suicide attempt and assuring everyone that it is more than okay to be weird and different. It was a great and heartfelt speech.

 

Alejandro Inarritu gets the Director nod

Inarritu’s masterful work in Birdman is more than deserving of an award. I just didn’t think he could overpower the novel concept that Linklater raised into a truly great film. I honestly was hoping for a tie in this category.

 

Neil Patrick Harris

He opened the show with a glorious musical number, as is to be expected. But he followed it up with a bunch of awkward jokes and crowd bits that didn’t land. His Birdman underwear gag was acceptable, but by no means did Doogie Howser steal the show.