By Daniel Konstantinovic
Reporter
This past Sunday night the biggest names in Hollywood gathered at the Dolby Theater to celebrate the 86th annual Academy Awards, unarguably the most highly regarded award show in all of Hollywood. I personally don’t care much for the red carpet display of fashion before the ceremony itself. I care purely about the films themselves, and I love to see the year’s greatest actors, directors, composers, writers, and others involved in the filmmaking process get the recognition they deserve.
If you followed me on twitter last night (@DanielKCourant), you would have seen that I was live tweeting the Oscars, providing my predictions:
My pick for Actress in a Supporting Role: Sally Hawkins. The Academy picks: Lupita Nyong'o
— Danny Konstantinovic (@DanielKCourant) March 3, 2014
Reactions:
Who let Madea out of prison and into the Oscars???
— Danny Konstantinovic (@DanielKCourant) March 3, 2014
And occasionally throwing in some facts about the history of the show and its nominees.
Abdi reminds me of Haing S Ngor, a Cambodian doctor who was nominated and won Supporting Actor for "The Killing Fields", also his first film
— Danny Konstantinovic (@DanielKCourant) March 3, 2014
Starting the night off, I had 13 tweets. By the end of the show, I topped it off at 113. That’s a lot of tweets. And though I may not have gotten as many retweets as Ellen Degeneres’ celebrity selfie, which crashed twitter and became the most retweeted tweet of all time, I still enjoyed imparting my excessive knowledge of film to all those who read them.
This year was an incredibly predictable year for the Oscars. So predictable, in fact, that I was able to correctly predict 21 of the 24 winners (not including the short features). My family and I agreed to bet on each category, and for everyone one someone got wrong that another person got right, five dollars were owed to that person. By the end of the night I was five dollars up – it would have been $15 had I not bet $10 on a guess that Philip Seymour Hoffman would be mentioned outside the traditional post-mortem tribute.
There were no really shocking upsets last night, and many favorites won their well-deserved awards: Lupita Nyong’o received Best Supporting Actress for “Twelve Years a Slave”, Cate Blanchett received Best Actress (the most predictable result of the night) for “Blue Jasmine” despite concerns that she might have gotten snubbed due to the recent Woody Allen scandal, and “12 Years a Slave” ended the night with a win for Best Picture. The biggest upset was probably the fact that “American Hustle”, nominated for a total of ten Oscars (tied with “Gravity” for the most nominations this year) walked away with nothing to its name.
“American Hustle” was the third nomination for writer/director David O. Russel, previously nominated for “The Warrior” and last year’s “Silver Linings Playbook”, for which Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence were also nominated. Lawrence took away Best Actress last year while Cooper was nominated for Best Actor. The two were nominated once again this year, both for supporting roles.
Among other notable nominees were Barkhad Abdi for his supporting role as Skinny in “Captain Phillips”, a limo driver from Somalia whose first-time-actor story is reminiscent of 1985s Haing S. Ngor, a Cambodian Physician who was also nominated and won for his first role in “The Killing Fields” as Dith Pran. Abdi lost the Oscar to Jared Leto who won for his role in “Dallas Buyer’s Club”
Though indubitably a great year for cinema (and especially for women in cinema, considering that around half of the top grossing films of 2013 passed the famous “Bechdel Test”), this year’s Academy Awards proved to be fairly uncontroversial, and while that may be a little bit disappointing for someone like me who loves to try and predict the winners, the takeaway is that all the awards handed out on Sunday truly went to the best of the best from 2013.
