Tonight we honour Hollywood’s best and whitest. I mean brightest.

Oscar Winners 2015

Neil Patrick Harris: Congratulations to all of the nominees, in particular the eight best-picture nominees. They have all grossed over $600 million. American Sniper alone is responsible for over $300 million of that. To put that in perspective: everyone on this side is the seven other nominees. And, American Sniper is — Oprah. (To Oprah) Because you’re rich.

David Letterman: (To Oprah) Oprah, Uma. (To Uma) Uma, Oprah.

As usual, I didn’t watch. It would take David Letterman hosting again, or someone else guaranteed to be provocative. Which just won’t happen. Entertaining entertainers tend to bland out amid the worldwide broadcast headlights, for fear of causing offence. Respect is due to Neil Patrick Harris however. He merely tripped where Letterman had previously buried himself, but he still got in an Oprah gag. True, Harris’ wasn’t as disarmingly batty as Dave’s but all credit to him for having a go.

Last year my mix of stabs in the dark and sure things yielded 16 out of 24 correct picks. This year I only got 12. Much of that – aside from the shorts categories, where no one has the faintest – came from miscalculating the swing to the Birdman and being left high and dry by Boyhood’s spectacular misses.

Best Picture

Winner: Birdman

I guessed: Boyhood

I got the big three completely wrong, but the most curious thing is how Birdman scored the big one but missed its formerly most likely slam dunk (Best Actor). Following Alfonso Cuaron’s win last year, Alejandro González Iñárritu is to be congratulated for not succumbing to British-style self-glorification and proclaiming, “The Mexicans are coming”.

How will this win look in years to come? I suspect The Grand Budapest Hotel and Boyhood will have greater longevity, but few are going to say a lousy film won, and a good four of the nominees might have had that levelled at them.

Best Director

Winner: Alejandro González Iñárritu (Birdman)

I guessed: Richard Linklater (Boyhood)

I called Linklater, putting Iñárritu a distant second in likelihood. As with Best Picture, at least someone deserving won out.

Best Actor

Winner: Eddie Redmayne (The Theory of Everything)

I guessed: Michael Keaton (Birdman)

And the disability Oscar goes to… everyone! I seriously didn’t think even the Academy would do a double-header for both Actor and Actress, the kind of self-congratulatory heart-bleeding for which Hollywood rightly gets ridiculed. But they did. And Redmayne is just the latest actor to convince undiscerning voters that the best performance is the most obvious one.

Not that Redmayne wasn’t very good, of course. I just doubt he would have been so warmly welcomed by voters if he had gone “full retard”. As for Keaton, it’s really hard luck. I don’t think he was ever really on radar before as a Best Actor contender (Clean and Sober maybe?), and I don’t think he will be again.

Best Actress

Winner: Julianne Moore (Still Alice)

I guessed: Julianne Moore (Still Alice)

And the second disability Oscar goes to… The only one of the Big Four I got right, mainly because everyone got it right. And bless Julianne, she deserves it. The only unfortunate side is that, like Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart or Jessica Lange in Blue Sky, no one is going to remember the movie for which they were rewarded.

Best Supporting Actor

Winner: J.K. Simmons (Whiplash)

I guessed: J.K. Simmons (Whiplash)

See Julianne above for likelihood.

Best Supporting Actress

Winner: Patricia Arquette (Boyhood)

I guessed: Patricia Arquette (Boyhood)

See Julianne and J.K. above for likelihood. The consolation prize for Boyhood too, which few would have guessed at the outcome even only a month ago (including me).

Best Original Screenplay

Winner: Birdman

I guessed: The Grand Budapest Hotel

I tipped The Grand Budapest Hotel, with this a runner-up. Some of the discussion (criticism) surrounding Birdman concerns how clever it actually is, and how much of it is down to its director’s ignorance of his expected lack of virtue.

Best Adapted Screenplay

Winner: The Imitation Game

I guessed: The Imitation Game

“Stay weird, stay different”, unlike your tepid screenplay, Graham Moore. The Weinsteins’ Oscar campaigning usually bears some fruit, and this was an easy call, despite being a bit rubbish.

Best Cinematography

Winner: Birdman

I guessed: Birdman

Emmanual Lubezki wins two years on the trot. Virtuoso enough to be the most likely contender, and leaving Birdman with a tidy four gongs.

Best Costume Design

Winner: The Grand Budapest Hotel

I guessed: The Grand Budapest Hotel

I called all but Screenplay right for Grand Budapest, which made a strong technical showing. Perhaps not so odd; it’s so hugely idiosyncratic it probably left some cold in respect of the main categories. It’s not remotely worthy, either.

Best Film Editing

Winner: Whiplash

I guessed: American Sniper

I have to admit I found Whiplash’s editing leant too much on the obvious. But the Academy likes obvious.

Best Sound Mixing

Winner: Whiplash

I guessed: American Sniper

Deserved, if (as I said in the predictions) an obvious choice. So obvious I chose American Sniper. Which had to make do with…

Best Sound Editing

Winner: American Sniper

I guessed: American Sniper

A glorious triumph.

Best Visual Effects

Winner: Interstellar

I guessed: Guardians of the Galaxy

Can’t say I’m not pleased, but I thought Guardians of the Galaxy would bag it.

Best Makeup

Winner: The Grand Budapest Hotel

I guessed: The Grand Budapest Hotel

Tilda Swinton looked phenomenally decrepit.

Best Production Design

Winner: The Grand Budapest Hotel

I guessed: The Grand Budapest Hotel

The best Hotel won.

Best Original Song

Winner: Glory (Selma)

I guessed: Glory (Selma)

It couldn’t not, really.

Best Original Score

Winner: The Grand Budapest Hotel

I guessed: The Grand Budapest Hotel

Alexandre Desplat’s first win, and well deserved (the only shame is, Interstellar had to lose out).

Best Animated Short

Winner: Feast

I guessed: The Dam Keeper

Disney got it! They didn’t last year, so these things are less certain than they may look.

Best Documentary Short

Winner: Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1

I guessed: Joanna

I bet on the Holocaust. I lost.

Best Live Action Short

Winner: The Phone Call

I guessed: Butter Lamp

After The Voorman Problem lost last year I didn’t expert the quirky British short to win. So if there’s one next year, it probably won’t. Unless that’s exactly what they want you to think.

Best Documentary Feature

Winner: Citizenfour

I guessed: Virunga

Harvey Weinstein’s other saving face of the evening. I think it’s safe to predict that Oliver Stone’s dramatisation of Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing won’t be winning any big prizes come its Oscar night.

Best Foreign Language Film

Winner: Ida

I guessed: Leviathan

See, I only went and picked the wrong Holocaust picture to win.

Best Animated Feature

Winner: Big Hero 6

I guessed: Big Hero 6

Disney win again! Smart money was on How to Train Your Dragon 2, which most agree is superior to Big Hero 6. The first Marvel movie to win a Best Picture Oscar.

Abandon selective targeting. Shoot everything.

28 Weeks Later (2007) (SPOILERS) The first five minutes of 28 Weeks Later are far and away the best part of this sequel, offering in quick succession a devastating moral quandary and a waking nightmare, immortalised on the screen. After that, while significantly more polished, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo reveals his concept to be altogether inferior to Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s, falling back on the crutches of gore, nihilism, and disengaging and limiting shifts of focus between characters in whom one has little investment in the first place.

The Bible never said anything about amphetamines.

The Color of Money (1986) (SPOILERS) I tend to think it’s evident when Scorsese isn’t truly exercised by material. He can still invest every ounce of the technical acumen at his fingertips, and the results can dazzle on that level, but you don’t really feel the filmmaker in the film. Which, for one of his pictures to truly carry a wallop, you need to do. We’ve seen quite a few in such deficit in recent years, most often teaming with Leo. The Color of Money , however, is the first where it was out-and-out evident the subject matter wasn’t Marty’s bag. He needed it, desperately, to come off, but in the manner a tradesman who wants to keep getting jobs. This sequel to The Hustler doesn’t linger in the mind, however good it may be, moment by moment.

Doctors make the worst patients.

Coma (1978) (SPOILERS) Michael Crichton’s sophomore big-screen feature, and by some distance his best. Perhaps it’s simply that this a milieu known to him, or perhaps it’s that it’s very much aligned to the there-and-now and present, but Coma , despite the occasional lapse in this adaptation of colleague Robin Cook’s novel, is an effective, creepy, resonant thriller and then some. Crichton knows his subject, and it shows – the picture is confident and verisimilitudinous in a way none of his other directorial efforts are – and his low-key – some might say clinical – approach pays dividends. You might also call it prescient, but that would be to suggest its subject matter wasn’t immediately relevant then too.

I said I had no family. I didn’t say I had an empty apartment.

The Apartment (1960) (SPOILERS) Billy Wilder’s romcom delivered the genre that rare Best Picture Oscar winner. Albeit, The Apartment amounts to a rather grim (now) PG-rated scenario, one rife with adultery, attempted suicide, prostitution of the soul and subjective thereof of the body. And yet, it’s also, finally, rather sweet, so salving the darker passages and evidencing the director’s expertly judged balancing act. Time Out ’s Tom Milne suggested the ending was a cop out (“ boy forgives girl and all’s well ”). But really, what other ending did the audience or central characters deserve?

Your desecration of reality will not go unpunished.

2021-22 Best-of, Worst-of and Everything Else Besides The movies might be the most visible example of attempts to cling onto cultural remnants as the previous societal template clatters down the drain. It takes something people really want – unlike a Bond movie where he kicks the can – to suggest the model of yesteryear, one where a billion-dollar grosser was like sneezing. You can argue Spider-Man: No Way Home is replete with agendas of one sort or another, and that’s undoubtedly the case (that’s Hollywood), but crowding out any such extraneous elements (and they often are) is simply a consummate crowd-pleaser that taps into tangible nostalgia through its multiverse take. Of course, nostalgia for a mere seven years ago, for something you didn’t like anyway, is a symptom of how fraught these times have become.

Captain, he who walks in fire will burn his feet.

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973) (SPOILERS) Ray Harryhausen returns to the kind of unadulterated fantasy material that made Jason and the Argonauts such a success – swords & stop motion, if you like. In between, there were a couple of less successful efforts, HG Wells adaptation First Men in the Moon and The Valley of the Gwangi (which I considered the best thing ever as a kid: dinosaur walks into a cowboy movie). Harryhausen’s special-effects supremacy – in a for-hire capacity – had also been consummately eclipsed by Raquel Welch’s fur bikini in One Million Years B.C . The Golden Voyage of Sinbad follows the expected Dynamation template – blank-slate hero, memorable creatures, McGuffin quest – but in its considerable favour, it also boasts a villainous performance by nobody-at-the-time, on-the-cusp-of-greatness Tom Baker.

Listen to the goddamn qualified scientists!

Don’t Look Up (2021) (SPOILERS) It’s testament to Don’t Look Up ’s “quality” that critics who would normally lap up this kind of liberal-causes messaging couldn’t find it within themselves to grant it a free pass. Adam McKay has attempted to refashion himself as a satirist since jettisoning former collaborator Will Ferrell, but as a Hollywood player and an inevitably socio-politically partisan one, he simply falls in line with the most obvious, fatuous propagandising.

Archimedes would split himself with envy.

Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977) (SPOILERS) Generally, this seems to be the Ray Harryhausen Sinbad outing that gets the short straw in the appreciation stakes. Which is rather unfair. True, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger lacks Tom Baker and his rich brown voice personifying evil incarnate – although Margaret Whiting more than holds her own in the wickedness stakes – and the structure follows the Harryhausen template perhaps over scrupulously (Beverly Cross previously collaborated with the stop-motion auteur on Jason and the Argonauts , and would again subsequently with Clash of the Titans ). But the storytelling is swift and sprightly, and the animation itself scores, achieving a degree of interaction frequently more proficient than its more lavishly praised peer group.

You just threw a donut in the hot zone!

Den of Thieves (2018) (SPOILERS) I'd heard this was a shameless Heat rip-off, and the presence of Gerard Butler seemed to confirm it would be passable-at-best B-heist hokum, so maybe it was just middling expectations, even having heard how enthused certain pockets of the Internet were, but Den of Thieves is a surprisingly very satisfying entry in the genre. I can't even fault it for attempting to Keyser Soze the whole shebang at the last moment – add a head in a box and you have three 1995 classics in one movie – even if that particular conceit doesn’t quite come together.

You have a very angry family, sir.

Eternals (2021) (SPOILERS) It would be overstating the case to suggest Eternals is a pleasant surprise, but given the adverse harbingers surrounding it, it’s a much more serviceable – if bloated – and thematically intriguing picture than I’d expected. The signature motifs of director and honestly-not-billionaire’s-progeny Chloé Zhao are present, mostly amounting to attempts at Malick-lite gauzy natural light and naturalism at odds with the rigidly unnatural material. There’s woke to spare too, since this is something of a Kevin Feige Phase Four flagship, one that rather floundered, showcasing his designs for a nu-MCU. Nevertheless, Eternals manages to maintain interest despite some very variable performances, effects, and the usual retreat into standard tropes, come the final big showdown.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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