Oscars 2015: How you should remember it

Like most years, this year’s Academy Awards also taught us that one mustn’t make much if the next time a "darling of the critics and audiences alike" film garners up a bunch of Oscar nominations or the "visionary" director is ignored and not nominated. Most people were as surprised at American Sniper getting six nominations including best picture and best actor as they were at Selma being ignored across all major categories in spite of garnering a best picture nod.

Similarly, many expected Boyhood to walk away with best picture or best director award at the cost of The Grand Budapest Hotel or Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) but in the end, the evening as expected turned out to be about the two most nominated films and generally as predictable as the ticking of a clock.

While in no particular order most Oscars are best remembered for the correlation between the number of nominations and the wins along with the big surprises and the shockers. In this context, the biggest losers were The Imitation Game, American Sniper while, predictably, both Birdman and The Grand Budapest Hotel won most of the awards they were nominated for. But the true big surprises of 2015 were Whiplash, which walked away with three honours, and Boyhood which being a favourite of critics and audiences could get only one out of the six it was running for.

Whiplash was made under five million dollars and was shot under 20 days across a handful of locations. It rightfully won the award for best editing for there’s never a moment in the film where these parameters hamper the storytelling and one hardly blinks or looks away. Boyhood and American Sniper best exemplify how the Oscars end up working. Both films were successful with audiences as well as critics with Boyhood winning numerous awards across film festivals and American Sniper cashing in at the box-office. From the point of view of popular cinema both initiated a debate on a horde of topics ranging from cinematic to political and both were considered to be darlings of the members of Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences, the voting body for the Oscars, and yet both the films could manage only one award each.

One factor that many of us tend to forget is that every voting member must see all the nominations in a category to cast a vote. So, for Boyhood and American Sniper garnering nominations wasn’t a big deal and looking at how they lost out suggests that most members who could vote chose to ignore them. One of the reasons for Boyhood running out of steam could be that it peaked very early on in the season and the politics of American Sniper didn’t work well with the liberals. A tweet summed it best how the Academy worked - American Sniper and Selma both winning a single Oscar ensures we’d never know whether liberals or conservatives are better. While opinion on American Sniper was divided into two extreme categories, there were hardly a few voices that didn’t like Boyhood. Shot over the course of 12 years where the narrative of the film follows the same protagonist Boyhood is not just an audacious idea but also a mammoth undertaking besides being an ode to cinema and, dare I say, life itself. Although universally praised some found the USP at best an interesting add-on and felt it can’t qualify as the sole reason for the awe Boyhood has inspired. Perhaps watching life unfold on a cellphone screen in a Facebook era where every single gesture is chronicled and even noticed or "liked" didn't really cut home. A lone critical voice, Kenneth Turan of LA Times, found the film’s narrative to be "fatally cobbled together". But what makes Boyhood a true milestone is its underlying theme of witnessing a sense of loss of innocence on screen and in that aspect the film deserved more at cinema’s biggest awards night.

Awards are generally a nod to an achievement in a particular category and in that sense Oscars 2015 have mostly gotten it right. Even though The Imitation Game notched up eight nominations the only thing that made it exceptional was the writing and yes, it got the award for best adapted screenplay. Similarly Wes Anderson’s vision of The Grand Budapest Hotel comes alive largely with the production design, the costumes and the make-up and yes, it was fully acknowledged for that.

While it can be argued that Anderson and his film ought to have walked away with the best director and best picture, it’s worthwhile to note that Alejandro González Iñárritu. Iñárritu’s stamp as the captain of the ship and creator of the universe called Birdman is far greater. And, therefore the honours just like the recognition for its cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki. By comparison Boyhood’s loss especially for directing and best film is more resounding for there could be another version of Birdman but to imagine someone undertaking an endeavour such as Boyhood again is difficult. Some have rightly said that documentaries films have captured what Boyhood aimed for more poignantly but to create a film where perhaps for the first time the audiences' and the actors emotions mirrored each other is rare. The film translates "what will happen next" in a visual context every time the characters come face-to-face and is echoed by both the actors as well as the audience. Boyhood is the rare occasion the actors and the viewer found themselves on the same page and this connected the two in a most unlikely fashion.

This was also the first time this writer chose to follow the Oscars more on twitter than watching it live on television. For the last few years the Oscars have been increasingly designed keeping the TV viewer in mind and therefore everything is dictated by what could entertain the ones at home more than the ones sitting there. Following the fiasco of James Franco and Anne Hathaway in 2011, old favourite Billy Crystal was brought back and while Neil Patrick Harris was better than some of the recent choices, the show in itself has become so long and boring that no host can be squarely blamed. Some of Harris’ jokes like the one about Edward Snowden not being there due to some treason or chastising all for liking David Oyelowo more now in order to make up for snubbing him were in fact quite politically incorrect and even funny. Perhaps being a sitcom star Harris’ split second silence for the audience to laugh made his effort look a bit too concerted.

By the end the Oscars resembled some desi awards function more than one would have imagined. And maybe next time they could call Shah Rukh Khan to host after all there was enough gaana-bajana and more over it seemed like a lot of the picture was left baaki between the nominations and the manner in which the Oscars were handed out because by the end sab kuch theek hi ho gaya.