Projection Room: The Oscars 2018 in a nutshell

And that officially concludes the awards season- it’s 5am in the morning as I write this (well, the barely legible, tiredness induced first draft at least, I’m tweaking this after a good lie-in), and as ever, there’s a lot to process following the 90th Academy Awards- and what a night it was for Hollywood. It might have been predictable, but the folks behind the Oscars certainly had some surprises to make sure last year’s Best Picture saga was all but a distant memory.

The big winners

The Shape of Water was the major winner of the night, scooping 4 awards for Direction, Score, Production Design and Best Picture, and for Guillermo Del Toro’s vision to be recognised in the way that it was must be fulfilling for a director who has worked tirelessly for 25 years to bring his visions to the big screen. Dunkirk also had a great night, with 3 big wins for Sound Editing, Sound Mixing and Film Editing, and while it may suck as a Nolan fan to see him get looked over once again, the field really was wide open this year in the majority of the categories. Call Me By Your Name secured that Adapted Screenplay win easily, with the same being said for Pixar’s latest film Coco and its domination of all the Animated Feature awards across the circuit. With the technical side of things, Darkest Hour set the standard for Make-Up and Hairstyling, and Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film Phantom Thread procured the Costume Design statue from the Academy.

All night, it was a real case of all the favourites winning, with Roger Deakins picking up that long awaited nod for Cinematography (alongside the VFX department that worked alongside him on Blade Runner 2049), Sam Rockwell and Allison Janney picking up Supporting Performance honours, and the mighty Gary Oldman and Frances McDormand (following a truly epic and totally unfiltered speech) making their presence felt in the Lead categories.

The shocks

Get Out winning Original Screenplay was a key talking point in the minutes surrounding the win, and it was quite the moment for Jordan Peele. A year ago, this film was merely a low budget horror. Now it’s an Oscar winning blockbuster, and that is thanks to the audiences who seen this film in their millions. For Original Song though, while the majority of the public wanted Pasek and Paul to pick up another win for their work on The Greatest Showman’s anthemic This is Me, instead the Academy played it safe and went with the generic track from Coco. Yes, I know it was written by the duo who unleashed Let It Go on the world- but we all know how that one turned out.

The quality of the ceremony

Well, if last year was Jimmy Kimmel’s worst nightmare he certainly made up for it this year. His monologue set the tone perfectly- a celebration of Hollywood’s past, present and future, not just within the film industry but also the social tensions outside our beloved cinema screens, and while he referenced the ‘incident’ involving the envelopes that made this time last year so memorable, the way the night was structured and presented was bang on- so well done to the Academy there. It didn’t feel like a 4 hour show for once.

And that’s that…

Awards season is done. But blockbuster season is just beginning. Let the road to the 2019 Oscars begin then.