UPDATE: All the winners for the Academy Awards are below, in the order in which they were presented. Congratulations to everyone who won! We’ll be back soon with plenty of post-Oscars coverage.
Thank the maker, we are finally here. The 87th Annual Academy Awards have commenced and CraveOnline is ready to announce all the winners with live updates from the Oscars. It’s been a long, strange trip everybody. It seems like only yesterday that Selma seemed poised to sweep the nominations and win all the big awards. Whatever happened to that anyway?
As of this moment, the Oscars ceremony has just started, but let’s take a quick moment to recap the biggest shockers of the awards season. American Sniper came out of nowhere to become the highest grossing Best Picture nominee. Birdman started winning almost every single guild award imaginable. All the acting nominees turned out to be white. The Weinstein Company exploited the legacy of Alan Turing to earn sympathy votes for The Imitation Game, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences didn’t bother doing any research and nominated the original screenplay for Whiplash in the wrong category.
Check Out: Oscar Predictions 2015: Who Will Win (and Who Should)
What’s more, going into this year’s Academy Awards we seem to be in for the most predictable Oscars ceremony in years. All but one of the acting categories appear to be foregone conclusions, with only Best Actor seemingly up for grabs between Michael Keaton in Birdman and Eddie Redmayne in The Theory of Everything. Otherwise, we’re only looking at possible surprises in the Best Director, Best Original and Adapted Screenplay, or the technical awards, to shake things up this year.
It’s not too late to check out CraveOnline’s 2015 Oscar Predictions to see how things are expected to shake out, and to judge us on our Academy Awards acumen as the actual awards are finally given out. (And don’t forget that our B-Movies Podcast has a wager going between co-hosts William Bibbiani and Witney Seibold. Whoever predicts the fewest winners has to record a free downloadable commentary track for the worst movie of 2014!)
We’ll be updating as soon as all the awards are handed out, with live commentary and updates. Keep coming back throughout the evening for ongoing Oscars coverage, and follow us on Twitter at @CraveOnline where film critics William Bibbiani and Witney Seibold are live tweeting the ceremony!
And the winners are…
Best Supporting Actor: J.K.Simmons, Whiplash
J.K. Simmons, as predicted, wins the Supporting Actor Oscar for his nightmarish yet shockingly sane performance in Whiplash, CraveOnline’s pick for the Best Film of 2014. It’s his first Oscar nomination, and his first win, and he absolutely deserves it for creating one of the first iconic villains of the 21st century.
Best Costume Design: The Grand Budapest Hotel
The Grand Budapest Hotel wins what is expected to be one of many Academy Awards this evening. The Oscar goes to Milena Canonero, who previously won Oscars for her immaculate costume designs for Marie Antoinette, Chariots of Fire and Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon.
Best Makeup & Hairstyling: The Grand Budapest Hotel
The Grand Budapest Hotel continues what could very well be a technical awards sweep with an Oscar for Best Makeup & Hairstyling. Some folks may be wondering why the inventive alien designs of Guardians of the Galaxy lost this award. It’s because the Oscars know what old people are supposed to look like, and like to reward films that make young people look more like that.
Best Foreign Language Film: Ida
The frontrunner for Best Foreign Language Film shockingly just won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Ida is a Polish film about a nun who discovers that her parents were Jewish, and disappeared during World War II. She goes off on a journey to discover who they were and, perhaps, who she really is. It’s a handsomely filmed drama that is also nominated for Best Cinematography this year. Bonus Points for the hilarious acceptance speech in which the filmmaker told audiences to “take a drink” because the orchestra started playing him off stage.
Best Live-Action Short: The Phone Call
The Academy Award for Best Live-Action Short goes to The Phone Call, a tense and emotional film in which Sally Hawkins (Godzilla) plays a suicide prevention hotline operator who races against time to prevent Jim Broadbent from giving up on life. CraveOnline called The Phone Call “the best film nominated this year” in the live-action short category!
Best Documentary Short: Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1
All of the Oscar-nominated documentary shorts this year were depressing as hell, but Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1 was easily the best. It’s currently available on HBO Go, so give it a watch. It’s riveting.
Best Sound Mixing: Whiplash
The winner for Best Sound Mixing goes to Whiplash, a film which – surprise, surprise – actually featured the best sound mixing of the year. The film concludes with a glorious cacophony of sound design, matched perfectly to the drama.
Best Sound Editing: American Sniper
American Sniper wins its first Oscar of the evening, with an Academy Award for Best Sound Editing. Just a reminder: Best Sound Editing refers to the creation of new sounds, like explosions and stuff.
Best Supporting Actress: Patricia Arquette, Boyhood
Check Out: Patricia Arquette on ‘Boyhood,’ Momhood and Armpits (Exclusive Interview)
As predicted by everybody ever, Patricia Arquette takes home the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She was the center of a very minor, short-lived controversy over whether her performance as a struggling single mother was more deserving of a Best Lead Actress nomination, but it didn’t affect the Academy’s appreciation of her career-best performance.
Patricia Arquette brought down the house with her acceptance speech, in which she called for wage equality for women. Damn straight. Stick it to the man, Patricia Arquette!
Best Visual Effects: Interstellar
A film that divided critics, Interstellar nevertheless takes home the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects. No surprise here. Although a lot of folks loved the VFX in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, the Academy has a history of awarding the film that’s least embarrassing to write down on an official ballot. Apes on horseback just can’t compete with non-stop homages to 2001: A Space Odyssey, apparently.
Best Animated Short: Feast
The Oscar for Best Animated Short goes to Feast, the only film that mainstream audiences probably saw. The film, about a little dog and his relationship with his master, told from the perspective of the pooch’s food bowl, played in front of theatrical screenings of fellow Oscar nominee Big Hero 6. And it’s delightful. Check out our review of all the nominees here.
Best Animated Feature: Big Hero 6
Related: ‘Big Hero 6’ Directors Describe the Downside of Hugging Baymax (Exclusive Video)
The first Marvel movie to win a major Academy Award, Big Hero 6 defied expectations to win Best Animated Feature over supposed frontrunner How to Train Your Dragon 2. (Frontrunner, that is, since The LEGO Movie wasn’t nominated.) The film is an exciting superhero flick about the otherwise glum subjects of death and mourning.
Best Production Design: The Grand Budapest Hotel
The Oscar for Best Production Design goes to The Grand Budapest Hotel, arguably the best-looking film of the year (from a production design standpoint, at least). Wes Anderson’s films have mysteriously never won in this category, even though they all look like obsessive-compulsive fantasy dioramas. This movie absolutely earned this award. What a weird night. One in which most of the winners actually deserved the awards!
Best Cinematography: Emmanuel Lubezki, Birdman
The film with the best cinematography? Maybe, maybe not, but either way Birdman was clearly the frontrunner for its bravura camerawork, which gave off the distinct (but false) impression that most of Alejandro Innaritu’s film was shot in a single take. It’s Lubezki’s second Oscar in a row, after winning for last year’s similarly spectacular Gravity.
Best Editing: Whiplash
The Oscar for Best Editing goes to Whiplash! Holy crap, we can’t hide our enthusiasm under the veil of professionalism. The best edited film of the year not only won, but it won over the overwhelming favorite in the category, Boyhood, in an enormously surprising upset. Whiplash clearly won the Academy over, and as well it should have. Best movie of the year. We’re serious.
Best Documentary Feature: CitizenFour
The Best Documentary Feature winner is CitizenFour, about the infamous whistleblower Edward Snowden. CitizenFour has been the frontrunner in this category since the Roger Ebert documentary Life Itself got snubbed by the Academy.
Best Original Song: “Glory,” from Selma
Moments after John Legend and Common raised the Academy to their feet with an impossibly stirring performance of “Glory,” the rousing theme from Selma wins the Academy Award for Best Original Song. While we predicted that the bouciness of “Everything is Awesome” might take this award through sheer catchiness, “Glory” is obviously a worthy winner. What’s more, Common gave an exceptional acceptance speech. Way to to make this win into an important event, gentlemen. Congratulations.
Best Original Score: Alexandre Desplat, The Grand Budapest Hotel
Alexandre Desplat finally wins an Academy Award – after eight nominations, including another one this year for The Imitation Game – in honor of his exemplary and lighthearted score for The Grand Budapest Hotel. It was a tough year in the category, with a lot of great nominees and even a lot of great snubs, but it’s nice to see a worthy score earn the prize and for the oft-overlooked Desplat to finally earn himself an Oscar.
Best Original Screenplay: Birdman
Alejandro González Iñárritu, Nicolás Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris, Armando Bo win the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Birdman isn’t exactly cleaning up at the Oscars so far, but its biggest awards nominations have yet to be announced. It’s the first Oscar for Iñárritu, an Oscar darling who has never won an Academy Award before, despite two previous nominations, for Babel, and nominations for his films 21 Grams and Biutiful.
Best Adapted Screenplay: The Imitation Game
Related: Graham Moore on the Oscar-Winning Screenplay for ‘The Imitation Game’ (Exclusive Interview)
Graham Moore wins the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Imitation Game, based on the life of Alan Turing, who was persecuted for his homosexuality despite cracking the Enigma Code and, in effect, winning World War II for the Allies. He gave a very moving speech about his difficult childhood, placing the film’s themes of persecution in a moving, modern context. Although it was not our favorite nominee, it’s a fine piece of work and we extend him our congratulations.
Best Director: Alejandro González Iñárritu, Birdman
Alejandro González Iñárritu wins Best Director for Birdman, apparently proving to Richard Linklater that making a movie over the course of 12 years is small potatoes. Birdman is an Academy favorite and this win seems to cement the film as the Best Picture frontrunner. Also, Iñárritu claimed that he was wearing Michael Keaton’s tighty-whities from the film. Let’s hope they were washed!
Best Actor: Eddie Redmayne, The Theory of Everything
Related: Eddie Redmayne Tells CraveOnline About His Performance in ‘The Theory of Everything’ (Exclusive Video)
Eddie Redmayne takes home what will probably be the only Oscar win for The Theory of Everything. Redmayne plays Prof. Stephen Hawking in the acclaimed drama, and portrays the brilliant physicist throughout many different stages of ALS. Michael Keaton was expected by many to win this award, but perhaps the Academy thought his comeback role, and ensuing nomination, was all the award he needed.
Best Actress: Julianne Moore, Still Alice
As predicted (by every single person on the planet), Julianne Moore finally won an Academy Award tonight for Best Actress. Her sensitive portrayal of a woman suffering from early onset Alzheimer’s Disease is a real stand out in a movie that, otherwise, failed to make much of an impression on the Academy. It was the film’s only nomination. But she’s remarkable in the film.
And finally…
Best Picture of the Year: Birdman
Birdman concludes its somewhat impressive winning streak with its fourth and final Oscar win of the night, the big one, for Best Picture of the Year. We think the movie is just alright, but obviously its storyline about the suffering of a rich blockbuster filmmaker proving that they’re a real artist struck a chord with the Academy. We wonder why?
That’s it for this year’s Oscar ceremony, everybody. We’ll be back with more post-Oscars coverage tonight and tomorrow!
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and the host of The B-Movies Podcast and The Blue Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
