NOMINEES AND WINNERS OSCAR 2015

Did you watch the ceremony? If not, here it is:

LIST OF WINNERS:

Best supporting actor: JK Simmons for Whiplash

Best supporting actress: Patricia Arquette for Boyhood

Best foreign-language film: Ida – Paweł Pawlikowski

Best director: Alejandro González Iñárritu for Birdman

Best actor: Eddie Redmayne for The Theory of Everything

Best actress: Julianne Moore for Still Alice

Best picture: Birdman

Achievement in costume design: The Grand Budapest Hotel – Milena Canonero

Achievement in makeup and hairstyling: The Grand Budapest Hotel – Frances Hannon, Mark Coulier

Best documentary short subject: Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1 – Ellen Goosenberg Kent, Dana Perry

Achievement in sound mixing: Whiplash – Craig Mann, Ben Wilkins, Thomas Curley

Achievement in sound editing: American Sniper – Alan Robert Murray, Bub Asman

Achievement in visual effects: Interstellar – Paul J Franklin, Andrew Lockley, Ian Hunter, Scott R Fisher

Best animated short film: Feast – Patrick Osborne, Kristina Reed

Best animated feature film: Big Hero 6

Best production design: The Grand Budapest Hotel: Adam Stockhausen, Anna Pinnock

Achievement in cinematography: Birdman: Emmanuel Lubezki

Best original song: Glory from Selma – Lonnie Lynn (Common), John Stephens (John Legend)

Original screenplay: Alejandro González Iñárritu, Nicolás Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris, Armando Bo – Birdman

Where? The 87th Academy Awards took place on Sunday 22nd February in Los Angeles. The ceremony began at 8:30pm (1:30am in Europe)

Who did host the ceremony? The star Neil Patrick Harris (Gone Girl and How I Met your Mother) hosted the Oscars for the first time.  Harris kicked off the proceedings on an edgy note, saying it was a night to celebrate "Hollywood's best and whitest - sorry, brightest" - a cutting reference to this year's total lack of non-white acting nominees.

But the reaction on Twitter to his efforts has been mainly negative; Journalist Tina Brown (from The Daily Beast y Newsweek) called him "smirking" and "clueless", while Empire Magazine's Chris Hewitt said: "As star of How I Met Your Mother, Neil Patrick Harris has form with unfunny formats being stretched out beyond their natural finishing line."

YOU HAVE TO KNOW...

Best Picture: Birdman

Director: Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

Cast includes: Michael Keaton, Emma Stone, Edward Norton, Naomi Watts, Lindsay Duncan, Andrea Riseborough

What's the story? In this black comedy, former movie superhero actor Riggan Thomson (Keaton) hopes to revive his washed up career by putting on Broadway play.

Fact: Using some clever camerawork, the film looks as though it was shot in a single take.

What the critics say: "The director's surrealist portrait of modern times and the cult of celebrity is brilliant on so many levels that even the occasional downdraft can't keep Birdman from soaring." Betsey Sharkey, LA Times

Who are them?

Alejandro González Iñárritu (born August 15, 1963) is a Mexican film director, screenwriter, film producer, and composer. His five feature films – Amores perros (2000), 21 Grams (2003), Babel (2006), Biutiful (2010) and Birdman (2014) – have gained critical acclaim worldwide and have received multiple Academy Award nominations. He won three Academy Awards in 2015 for Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Picture for Birdman.

The Mexican director dedicated his best picture win for “Birdman” to his fellow Mexicans, and called on his countrymen to “find and build a government that we deserve.”

Regarding Mexicans living in the United States, he was more forceful: “I just pray they can be treated with the same dignity and respect of the ones that came before and built this incredible, immigrant nation.''

Eddie Redmayne: (born 6 January 1982) is an English actor, singer and model. He started his professional career as an actor in both theatre and television roles in the early 2000s and then made his film debut, Like Minds, in 2006.

He has since appeared in such prominent films as The Good Shepherd (2006), Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007), My Week with Marilyn (2011), Les Misérables (2012), The Theory of Everything (2014), and Jupiter Ascending (2014). Redmayne received universal critical acclaim for his performance as Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything, for which he has won the Academy Award for Best Actor, the Golden Globe Award, the Screen Actors Guild Award and the BAFTA Award. He has also continued to perform in theatre, most notably in the play Red (2010), on Broadway, for which he won the Tony Award for Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Play.

He attended Colet Court then Eton College, where he was in the same year as Prince William, Tom Hiddleston and Ivo Stourton. He went on to study history of art at Trinity College, Cambridge, from where he graduated with 2:1 Honours in 2003.

Julianne Moore is an American-British actress and children's author. Prolific in cinema since the early 1990s, Moore is particularly known for her portrayals of emotionally troubled women. Her career has involved both art house and Hollywood films.

Moore received considerable recognition in the late 1990s and early 2000s, earning Oscar nominations for Boogie Nights (1997), The End of the Affair (1999), Far from Heaven (2002), and The Hours (2002). Other notable film appearances include The Big Lebowski (1998), Magnolia (1999), Hannibal (2001), Children of Men (2006) and A Single Man (2009). She continued to work regularly in the 2010s, appearing in the popular Hunger Games series and receiving praise for her performances in The Kids Are All Right (2010), Maps to the Stars (2014), and Still Alice (2014), for which she has won the Academy Award, Golden Globe Award, Screen Actors Guild Award and BAFTA Award for Best Actress. In the television film Game Change (2012), she portrayed Sarah Palin and received the Emmy Award, Golden Globe Award, and Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Actress.

In addition to acting, Moore has written a successful series of children's books. She is married to the director Bart Freundlich, with whom she has two children.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-irritu-oscar-speech-20150222-htmlstory.html

http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-30681208

http://oscar.go.com/

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/oscars/oscars-2015-what-date-do-the-awards-take-place-and-how-can-you-watch-them-in-the-uk-10042201.html

http://web.orange.co.uk/article/news/neil_patrick_harris_nervous_and_boring

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julianne_Moore

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Redmayne

http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alejandro_Gonzalez_Inarritu

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/oscars/11419924/oscars-2015-live.html

http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/oscars/oscars-2015-live-winners-and-highlights-of-the-87th-academy-awards-ceremony-20150223-3qrby.html

OSCARS... WHAT ABOUT THEIR HISTORY?

The history of the Oscars begins on May 16, 1929. It was officially known as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Awards. The award ceremony was originally an attempt to help Hollywood improve its tawdry image, but it has grown to become the highest critical honor for cinematic professionals, in addition to one of the biggest public events on the Hollywood calendar.

The First Oscar Ceremony: 
The first Oscar award ceremony was held at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel in 1929. The first Academy president was the actor Douglas Fairbanks, who found himself very busy over the course of the ceremony, as he was handing out the statuettes by himself.

In contrast to the secrecy surrounding contemporary Oscar ceremonies, the first ceremony held no suspense, as the winners had been announced three months earlier. The statuettes were handed out quickly because most of the nominees and winners didn't go to the event.

Emil Jennings

The first of the 15 total statuettes handed out was received by the German actor Emil Jennings. He had plans to leave the country before the ceremony, and that is why he received his award early. This makes him the first person to ever receive an Oscar.

Janet Gaynor became the first woman winner of the Academy Award for best actress for her performance in three films: 7th Heaven, Sunrise: A song of two Humans and Street Angel. This was the only occasion on which an actress has won one Oscar for multiple film roles. 

Janet Gaynor

Evolution of the Oscars: 

The first Oscar award ceremony was the only one not to be broadcast publically. By the second year, the ceremony was being broadcast on radio. In 1953, the ceremony was broadcast on TV for the first time. In 1969 the broadcast went worldwide.

From 1929 to 1940, newspapers received the list of Oscar winners before the ceremony. This arrangement was done so the papers could publish the list in the evening edition, right after the award ceremony finished. 


The arrangement work well enough until 1940, when the Los Angeles Times published the winners early-before the actual ceremony. The Academy implemented a sealed-envelope method the following year, an approach that has worked so well that has been used ever since.

Evolution of the Oscar Statuette:

Margaret Herrick

The term "Oscar", came about by accident. It is used to refer to the little statuettes received by winners. It is believed that the academy librarian Margaret Herrick made an innocent comment that the little statue, which was named the Academy Award of Merit, looked like her uncle Oscar. The nickname stuck and it is now the general term most people use to refer to both the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science Awards and the actual awards ceremony. 

The actual Oscar award is 13 1/2 inches tall (34,3 cm). The very first Oscars were created from solid bronze. During the World War II, Oscars were made of plaster to help conserve resources. Nowadays, the statuette is gold plated and heavy, weighing in at about 8 pounds (3,6 kg).

The Oscar Academy:
The people who decide on the nominations and winners of the Oscars are known as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The original academy had only 36 members. Currently, the academy boasts around 6,000 members. 
Academy membership is limited to film artists working in the production of theatrically-released motion pictures. The Academy’s membership process is by sponsorship, not application.  Candidates must be sponsored by two Academy members from the branch to which the candidate seeks admission. In addition, Academy Award nominees are automatically considered for membership and do not require sponsors. 
Membership review takes place once a year, in the spring.
The Academy has 17 branches, for the crafts ranging from Actors to Writers, and two categories, Members-at-Large and Associates to accommodate individuals who work in motion picture production but do not fit into one of the branches.

THE ORIGIN OF OSCAR

BIBLIOGRAPHY: 

Oscars Ceremonies:  http://www.oscars.org/oscars/ceremonies/1929 [Access 20/02/2015]

The Oscars: http://oscar.go.com [Access 20/02/2015]

Oscars: http://www.oscars.org/ [Access 20/02/2015]

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_thW3N98cFQ [Access 27/02/2015]