Toy Story III beat Edinburgh-set The Illusionist in the animation feature category, as was expected. But King Colin (pictured above, arriving with Livia Giuggioli for the Oscars ceremony) did exactly as everyone predicted, winning the Best Actor award. Natalie Portman won Best Actress award for Black Swan as expected.
It was a great night for The King's Speech, which took the top awards for Best Picture and Best Director (surprisingly, beating David Fincher for Social Network), as well as Best Original Screenplay. Firth's Best Actor award made the Oscar haul for The King's Speech a solid 4 from 12 nominations.
Social Network won 3 awards from 8 nominations for Film Editing, Adapted Screenplay, and Original Score. Inception did well in the technical department winning the awards for Cinematography, Sound Editing, Sound Mixing, and Visual Effects, ensuring that this year's Oscars results were not completely lopsided.
However, the team behind True Grit must be feeling a little dejected that they leave the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood with nothing from 10 nominations.
My Predictions: 13/24 success rate
I managed to call over half of the results correctly. I should have followed my own advice on sticking with the bookies where Supporting Actors and Actresses are concerned. Would have been boring, but they and the Golden Globes were unanimous and ultimately right. Christian Bale and Melissa Leo took the respective male and female supporting actor awards for their roles in The Fighter.
The bookies were off-target though where the Foreign Film is concerned. It went the same way as The Golden Globes to Danish film In A Better World.
The Costume Award went to Alice in Wonderland - possibly the more eccentrically ("fantastically", even) costumed film getting the upper hand here. I picked The King's Speech.
Likewise with the Art Direction Award, Alice in Wonderland presented a more open canvas for the Art department to shine. And shine they did, although I was still riding the King's Speech bandwagon.
I really should have got off the bandwagon when The King's Speech came up against Inception for the Sound Mixing Award. My thinking: the audio mix was intrinsic to the emotional tapestry of The King's Speech. But Academy members were more impressed by the mix of Inception's sci-fi audioscape.
The Cinematography Award went to Wally Pfister, for Inception again, meaning True Grit's lens man Roger Deakins (my choice) still hasn't won after nine nominations.
On the shorts side, IMDB's native user rating system proved to be more accurate than my skewed interpretation of it. Luke Metheny's God of Love had the highest user-rating of all the five shorts in contention (7.7, compared with The Confession at 7.6, and Wish 143 at 7.5) and it ultimately was the winner. It didn't matter that there were fewer votes for God of Love than other films.
Aussie short The Lost Thing took the short animation, and Strangers No More won the Oscar for documentary short. Neither of which I selected.
And here are the winners.... (in bold are the ones I didn't guess correctly)
- Best Film: The King's Speech
- Best Director: Tom Hooper, The King's Speech
- Best Actor: Colin Firth, The King's Speech
- Best Actress: Natalie Portman, Black Swan
- Best Supporting Actor: Christian Bale, The Fighter
- Best Supporting Actress: Melissa Leo, The Fighter
- Best Animated Feature: Toy Story 3
- Best Cinematography: Wally Pfister, Inception
- Best Documentary: Inside Job
- Best Art Direction: "Alice in Wonderland" Robert Stromberg (production design), Karen O'Hara (Set Decoration)
- Best Makeup: Wolfman, Rick Baker and Dave Elsey
- Best Costume Design: Colleen Atwood, Alice in Wonderland
- Best Original Score: Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross in Social Network
- Best Original Song: We Belong Together, “Toy Story 3" Music and Lyric by Randy Newman
- Best Foreign Language Film: In A Better World (Denmark)
- Best Film Editing: Angus Wall and Kirk Baxter, Social Network
- Best Sound Editing: Richard King, Inception
- Best Sound Mixing: Inception Lora Hirschberg, Gary A. Rizzo and Ed Novick
- Best Visual Effects: Inception, Paul Franklin, Chris Corbould, Andrew Lockley and Peter Bebb
- Best Adapted Screenplay - Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network)
- Best Original Screenplay - David Seidler (King's Speech)
- Best Documentary Short: Strangers No More (Karen Goodman and Kirk Simon)
- Best Animated Short: The Lost Thing (Nick Batzias, Shaun Tan and Andrew Ruhemann)
- Best Live Action Short: God of Love (Luke Matheny)
Photo credit DARREN DECKER / ©A.M.P.A.S.
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