Oscars 2016: news and winners from the 88th Academy Awards

Since 2009, when the Academy changed Best Picture from a straight popular vote to something much more convoluted (ostensibly to more accurately reflect the Academy’s consensus), the winners have gotten much more self-congratulatory.

In the video above, Todd VanDerWerff helps me explain that the instant runoff system tends to honor “consensus” films that are often ranked second or third on voters’ ballots, rather than films that are polarizing — but often more daring — and rank first on some ballots but dead last on others.

In one of the more bizarre moments of the 2016 Oscars, Chris Rock brought out three (impossibly adorable) kids of Asian descent and used them to make a joke about China and Chinese sweatshops.

Rock introduced them as “Ming Zhu, Bao Ling, and David Moskowitz,” the “most dedicated, accurate, and hard-working” accountants at PricewaterhouseCoopers, the firm that tabulates the Oscar votes.

Racial diversity was definitely the biggest story of the 2016 Academy Awards. #OscarsSoWhite started trending again because no black actors or actresses were nominated for awards, and host Chris Rock never let the audience forget it.

But as badly as 2016 failed on racial diversity — and as very, very far as Hollywood still has to go on gender diversity — 2016 was a surprisingly good year for women at the Oscars.

Chris Rock’s biting monologue Sunday night at the Academy Awards pulled no punches on Hollywood’s longstanding lack of diversity.

“I’m here at the Academy Awards, otherwise known as the white people’s choice awards,” Rock said in his opening joke. “I realized if they nominated hosts, I wouldn’t even get this job. You’d be watching Neil Patrick Harris right now.”

Lady Gaga has turned out some powerful performances recently, but she saved her best for the Oscars.

Gaga wrote the Oscar-nominated “Til It Happens to You” for The Hunting Ground, a harrowing documentary about sexual assault on college campuses. The singer has been actively and passionately involved in raising awareness for the issue, and has been open about how she, too, is a survivor of rape.

The 2016 Oscars were a weird roller coaster ride of expectations.

The movie that won the night’s first award, Best Original Screenplay, bookended the evening by also winning Best Picture — but those were the only two prizes it won.

Sam Smith was part of one of the biggest upsets of the 2016 Oscars.

The singer-songwriter won Best Original Song for Spectre’s “Writing’s on the Wall,” beating out “Earned It” from 50 Shades of Grey and “Til It Happens to You” from The Hunting Ground — and then followed his win with an inelegant, erroneous, and self-congratulatory speech.

Leonardo DiCaprio didn’t have an Oscar, and that was hilarious, according to the internet. There were memes about it. Someone even made a video game where players stepped into the actor’s shoes and tried to chase down that elusive award.

It all stemmed from DiCaprio being just about the only major cast member from Titanic to not be nominated for an Oscar when that film won 11 awards (and was nominated for 14) in 1998.

Spotlight, Tom McCarthy’s drama about the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church, was named Best Picture at the Oscars Sunday, February 28, 2016. But did it deserve the award? We gathered some of our writers to discuss.

Todd VanDerWerff: Of the three nominees with a realistic shot at winning — The Big Short, The Revenant, and this — Spotlight was my preference (though I liked Mad Max and Brooklyn better of all nominees).

Sometimes it’s obvious who’s going to come away from the Oscars a winner with months to go before the ceremony (see: Titanic, Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, Schindler’s List).

Sometimes it comes down to two leading movies, as with 2015’s horse race between Richard Linklater’s Boyhood and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, which eventually pulled ahead.

We’re used to hearing Kevin Hart say silly, hilarious stuff that sometimes warrants a bleep. But at the Oscars on Sunday, Hart showed his rarely seen serious side and addressed the blazing lack of diversity in this year’s acting categories.

“I want to take a moment to applaud all of my actors and actresses of color tonight,” Hart said. “Tonight should not determine the hard work and effort you put into your craft. … These problems of today eventually become problems of the old. Let’s not let this issue of diversity beat us.”

Every year, the Oscars face a tricky challenge: How do they explain the many, many technical categories where the skill that’s being honored isn’t immediately obvious? Everybody knows what an actor does — or thinks they do, anyway — but what does a sound editor do, exactly?

Well, the 2016 Oscars did a terrific job of explaining these many below-the-line categories, with explanations from presenters as well as clips packages that explained some of the finer details of categories that might seem to reward the exact same thing.

The running theme of the 2016 Oscars was the awards show’s extreme lack of diversity. Chris Rock addressed the topic in his opening monologue, and a satirical clip later spoofed the all-white acting nominees by inserting black actors into Joy, The Martian, The Danish Girl, and The Revenant.

The critical commentary continued in a special “Black History Month” segment narrated by Angela Bassett, as Bassett teased a prolific actor-musician-pioneer who’s worked on a variety of projects, from Shark Tale to Enemy of the State.

The bear from The Revenant made it to the Oscars!

After Benicio Del Toro and Jennifer Garner introduced the 12-times-nominated survival film from the stage, the camera panned out into the audience to find the drama’s most famous co-stars. Naturally, Leonardo DiCaprio was there, but it seems the Academy also invited the bear that attacks him near the start of the film.

The acting categories at the 2016 Oscars didn’t include any nominees of color, but that didn’t stop Chris Rock — who had only just delivered a scorching, somewhat surprising monologue that directly addressed the #OscarsSoWhite protests — from proposing a few edits to the nominated films.

More specifically, he led the charge to insert some black actors into the action.

The biggest question going into the 2016 Oscars was how Chris Rock would handle the topic of diversity — namely, the lack of it in all four acting categories for the second year in the row. And Rock devoted his entire opening monologue to that subject.

His speech vacillated between putting the Oscars into perspective, declaring that Hollywood is racist, and pleading for more opportunity for actors of color.

Even when the winners are a surprise, awards shows are long and self-indulgent. And most of the time, they’re hopelessly predictable. Despite their grandeur, the Oscars — in all their pomp and circumstance and trailing gowns — are no exception.

At the very least, though, the 2016 Oscars have enlisted Chris Rock to host, which just about guarantees a sharper monologue than most hosts would dare to deliver. Also, he’s bound to reference the growing protests against the Academy’s all-white acting nominees, not to mention their attempts to stem the overwhelming tide of poor publicity with overhauls to their membership.

The 88th Academy Awards, the biggest entertainment awards show of the year, are going down tonight at 8:30 pm Eastern. You can watch them on ABC; you can also tune in to the ABC website for a live stream of the show, though you’ll need a login from your cable provider. And Vox will be live-blogging the whole celebrity-packed spectacle right here.

Will host Chris Rock’s monologue tackle #OscarsSoWhite? Will Spotlight surprise everyone and win Best Picture over the heavily favored The Revenant? Will Leonardo DiCaprio finally win one of those damn gold statues?

The 88th annual Academy Awards will begin at 8:30 pm Eastern on Sunday, February 28, broadcast live on ABC from the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles.

But right now, if you’re thinking about the Oscars, it’s probably because you’re filling out a ballot in hopes of winning your friendly local Oscar pool. And if you need informed choices, we’ve got ‘em.

In January, Kristen Stewart came perilously close to joining the parade of white actors drawing furor over their response to the #OscarsSoWhite protests.

Variety, reporting from the Sundance Film Festival, posted a clip of an interview with Stewart on January 25, and labeled it as her comment on the outcry over an overwhelmingly white slate of Oscar nominees. “Instead of sitting around and complaining about that, do something,” Stewart said in the video. “Go write something; go do something.”

Very often, the Oscar nominees for Best Foreign Language Film feel like, well, their own little countries. Occasionally, you’ll see a Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or Life Is Beautiful break into the main categories, but for the most part, the foreign films stand alone.

They also have a reputation for being esoteric, story-free art films that are hard to understand or, worse, boring. But that’s not really true. The Oscars rarely nominate American art films, and the same is true when it comes to the foreign nominees, which tend to have pretty strong, traditional stories.

The Best Animated Feature category at the 2016 Oscars is a great reminder that animation is one of the most vibrant art forms out there right now.

Forget the era when the category would be stuffed to the gills with mediocre computer-animated films from big-name studios. Nowadays, with the rise of indie animation distributors like GKIDS, the Best Animated Feature race celebrates a vast range of animated projects, from Pixar-produced behemoths to tiny films from Brazil.

There is little rhyme or reason to the Oscars.

Excellent performances, often by people of color, are snubbed. Movies, actors, and actresses who deserve to win get shut out. Movies, actors, and actresses who don’t deserve to win end up taking home trophies.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is making sweeping changes to its membership, in hopes of diversifying both its members and the annual Oscar nominees, after the second straight year with no nonwhite acting nominees and similar representation problems in numerous other categories. The Los Angeles Times has full details.

If you read between the lines of essentially everything written about the #OscarsSoWhite controversy, you’ll note that Academy members, while saying they, themselves, voted for various people of color, are often quick to point out the huge number of older Academy members, who hold very different views.

The most frustrating thing about Oscar snubs and surprises is that there’s often no explanation for them.

The annual nominations announcement is a bit of a blur. Names and categories are called out in rapid succession. Most of those actors, actresses, directors, and movies seem to “belong”; it isn’t until after the announcement is over that you begin to figure out who got left behind.