Oscars 2015: Everything you need to know about the 87th Academy Awards

The Oscars aren’t the cultural force they once were. Though the ratings remain relatively stable from year to year, they are generally down from their height in the 1990s. Nobody goes to see the Best Picture nominees any more, and Hollywood continues to slip away from the American mainstream. Fox News argued this quite explicitly in the wake of American Sniper’s Best Picture loss.

That’s the conventional wisdom, at least, shared nearly every year in the aftermath of another Oscar broadcast that the awards seem to cater only to an increasingly small portion of the American public that has watched the Oscar-nominated movies.

The red carpet has been rolled up, the lights of the Dolby Theatre are dimmed, and America has added Birdman to its list of films to check out once it gets to Netflix. Yes, the Academy Awards are over, and we won’t have to think about them again until nominations for the best films of 2015 are announced next January.

The 87th Oscars struggled a bit to find Oscar-friendly projects to reward. There were lots of great films in 2014, but many of them fell outside of the Academy’s comfort zone.

The Best Actor in a Leading Role Oscar race was widely seen as a two-way competition between The Theory of Everything’s Eddie Redmayne and Birdman’s Michael Keaton, with possible spoiler potential from American Sniper’s Bradley Cooper.

In the end, Redmayne won for his portrayal of Stephen Hawking. Vine user Beefyrhetoric caught what appears to be Keaton slipping his unused speech into his pocket while standing to cheer for Redmayne. Watch closely at the bottom of the screen.

Lady Gaga has never been the most polite award show attendee. She pretended to die on stage and ended up covered in blood during her performance at the 2009 VMAs. The next year, she wore a dress made of raw meat. At the Grammys in 2011, she hatched her way out of an enormous egg. Her shows were dramatic and often controversial, which is why ears perked up when the Oscars began marketing this year’s show with her name.

She didn’t arrive in monster form, though. For her Oscar debut, she donned a white, floor length ball gown with blonde hair extensions, and paid tribute to the 1965 Best Picture-winning musical The Sound of Music. She sang a five-minute medley of “The Hills Are Alive,” “My Favorite Things,” “Edelweiss” and “Climb Every Mountain.”

Patricia Arquette will be billed as a feminist hero for raising awareness about the wage gap in America during a fiery Oscar acceptance speech Sunday night — but maybe she shouldn’t be.

Holding her first golden statue after years of great roles, Arquette waved her arms around the microphone stand and proclaimed that women “have fought for everybody else’s equal rights. It’s our time to have wage equality once and for all, and equal rights for women in the United States of America.”

The 87th annual Academy Awards, held February 22, 2015, offered minimal potential for gigantic sweeps. Yes, both Birdman and Grand Budapest Hotel were nominated for nine awards a piece, but it seemed unlikely either would run the table.

Instead, we got a very evenly divided Oscars, where the big winner of the night, Birdman, didn’t really pick up any awards until well into the second hour of the show. It was a night where all eight Best Picture nominees went home with at least one award, and where Oscar predictors outguessed themselves more often than not.

Moore’s speech started out lighthearted and cute (he thanked Oprah for presenting the award), and he sent his love to his entire cast. But he quickly transitioned into a more serious tone, to briefly bring up his suicide attempt at 16 years old. Moore tried to take his life, he said, because he felt like he was weird. Like he didn’t fit in or belong anywhere.

“And now I’m standing here,” he said proudly. Here: as in, alive, on the other side of the rejection and the misunderstanding and the pain. It does truly get better, and Moore is proof of that.

Julianne Moore is one of the greatest actresses of her generation. And on Sunday night, at the 87th annual Academy Awards, she was recognized for her elegant, humanizing work in Still Alice.

“There’s no such thing as Best Actress, as is evidenced by the performances of my fellow actresses,” she said. “I’m thrilled that we were able to hopefully shine a light on Alzheimer’s disease … One of the wonderful things about movies is that it makes us feel seen and not alone. And people with Alzheimer’s deserve to be seen.”

After receiving the Oscar for Best Song for “Glory” from Selma, John Legend gave an impassioned speech calling out the present-day state of affairs for African Americans. One line stood out: “We live in the most incarcerated country in the world. There are more black men under correctional control today than there were under slavery in 1850.”

It’s become a widely cited statistic, after the publication of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow in 2011 — which helped make mass incarceration a hot topic of discussion. But is it true? Yes, the basic numbers check out — although the stat is a little misleading.

It was no surprise that “Glory” from Selma took the Oscar for Best Original Song. What was surprising, however, were the names that were announced as winners:

John Stephens and Lonnie Lynn.

By Alex Abad-Santos

There’s a moment in Birdman, which just won Best Picture at the 87th annual Academy Awards, that’s slight but revealing. Edward Norton, playing method actor extraordinaire Mike, needles and prods Michael Keaton’s Riggan about the fake gun he uses during the final scene of their play.

It wasn’t easy to stand out on Oscar night — a night that featured technicolor cowboys, storm troopers, and Neil Patrick Harris singing and dancing. But Common and John Legend’s soaring and ultimately heartbreaking performance of “Glory” from the movie Selma did it.

The song itself is a soaring marvel, flying on the wings of John Legends’s vocals. But there’s also a brutal, brilliant strength to it with Common’s rapping.

Winning an Oscar is something few people outside of Meryl Streep and Colin Firth will ever get to experience in their lifetimes. And director Paweł Pawlikowski understands this better than anyone. Pawlikowski won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film with his film Ida and gave what felt like a completely improvised speech.

Then the “music” slowly started to trickle in from the speakers above. This is a sign that the producers and powers that be want you to wrap it up. Pawlikowski heard himself being played off and seemingly started to wrap it up, until he just decided not to.

Holding her first Oscar, Patricia Arquette leaned into the microphone. Her arms waved the paper with her notes on it. Passionately, she dedicated her speech to the women who “gave birth to every citizen and taxpayer of this nation.”

“We have fought for everybody else’s equal rights. It’s our time to have wage equality once and for all, and equal rights for women in the United States of America,” Arquette said.

Are you not watching the Oscars? Then you just missed Emma Stone clutching an Oscar made out of Legos after being announced as a nominee for Best Actress in a Supporting Role. She was nominated for Birdman and lost to Patricia Arquette from Boyhood.

The Lego Oscars were handed out for the performance of “Everything Is Awesome” from The Lego Movie. Now everybody can have an Oscar, even if it’s made out of small, interlocking bricks.

Let’s face it: the first hour of the Oscars, aside from Neil Patrick Harris’ opening number, was a bit dull. There were awards for makeup and costumes, but they weren’t necessarily the biggest of prizes that will be handed out tonight.

Thankfully we got to the fantastic craziness of the live performance of “Everything Is Awesome,” a Best Original Song nominee from The Lego Movie. Tegan and Sara were joined by the Lonely Island Boys for a bright and energetic performance full of rainbows, Batman, and synchronized frenetic dancing that this awards show desperately needed.

One of the most powerful performances of the year was David Oyelowo’s portrayal of Martin Luther King, Jr., in Selma. And for some reason that is awfully hard to fathom, Oyelowo won’t be recognized in the Best Actor category on Sunday night at the 87th Annual Academy Awards.

Knowing that, Selma director Ava DuVernay shared a special clip of her and Oyelowo on Sunday night. “I never shared this. I saved it for today. A special outtake of my hero. I love you, David. You are my Best Actor,” DuVernay tweeted, and posted the above clip of what appears to be the final day of shooting for Oyelowo.

We are all going to be watching the Oscars Sunday night, and there are events that transpire nearly every time (somebody paying homage to Meryl Streep from the stage?). To help you “honor” these Academy Award traditions, we give you our very own Oscar Bingo card, with three extras to play along with your friends.

Oscar Bingo is no different from normal bingo. In fact, we’d say it’s probably more fun. Tick off or X out the boxes after a particular action takes place or a presenter mentions a phrase from your card.

Tonight a 8:30 pm Eastern, ABC will host the 87th annual Academy Awards. The Oscars, the most prestigious awards in the film industry, will feature some of the biggest names in Hollywood, both on the red carpet and up on stage, collecting their trophies.

This year’s Academy Awards will be hosted by Neil Patrick Harris, making his Oscars debut. He’s rumored to be kicking off the show by performing a song written by Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez, of Frozen fame. Adam Levine, Tim McGraw, Common, John Legend, and Rita Ora will also perform.

On Sunday night, a new crop of Oscar winners will be crowned at the 87th annual Academy Awards. As you read this, the red carpet is being readied, rehearsals have been held, and actresses and actors are being stuffed into their glitzy outfits.

For the producers, directors, and actors behind Birdman and Grand Budapest Hotel the night could be big. Those two movies lead the pack, both with nine nominations, and both are recognized in the Best Picture category. Birdman’s Michael Keaton, Edward Norton, Emma Stone and director Alejandro González Iñárittu are all nominated in their respective categories, while Grand Budapest flexed its muscle in the cinematography, director, and screenwriting categories.

On Sunday, February 22, 2015, a new crop of Oscar winners will be crowned. And a few movies, actors, and behind the scenes personnel will be able to stick “Academy Award Winner” before their names in movie trailers, press releases, and obituaries.

Most of those nominated will lose, but will still get to slap “Academy Award Nominee” or “Academy Award-nominated” on their resumes and IMDB pages.

Nothing screams Oscars like the hour before the awards actually start and the most famous names in Hollywood step onto the red carpet to be judged harshly for who they’re wearing and how well their dresses fit. For some, red carpet fashion is vapid and excessive, for others it’s their favorite part of one of Hollywood’s biggest nights. And it’s a huge night for the designers whose work will be showcased on a national stage.

Best and worst dressed lists may seem silly, but they really define the way celebrities are seen and the fate of their dress designers:

On Sunday night, the Academy Awards will finally put an end to the annual flurry of predictions that start each year when Oscar nominations are announced: who will win best picture?

But, despite people’s best efforts, Oscar predictions are often a crapshoot. There are all sorts of different data points to reference. Two of the most accurate predictors of a win are the DGA awards (won this year by Birdman) and the total number of Oscar nominations the film has received. (This year’s nomination totals are led by The Grand Budapest Hotel and Birdman, both with nine.)

Read through the rules and regulations that govern the Oscars, and you’ll find a hodgepodge of weird clauses and statutes that seem to be pasted onto the overall awards at random. But plenty of these are there for a reason — at some point, somebody found a loophole in the rules, and they’ve been spackled over to prevent future exploitation of said loophole.

Here are five of the oddest sections of the Oscar rules, and the reasons they’re there.

Some of the most popular films Hollywood has produced have been based on books. And that’s no less true of the best films of 2014. Of the many movies nominated for Oscars at this year’s ceremony, six are book-to-movie adaptations.

Here, from BookBub, is a handy graphic of information about the films and their source material.