DiCaprio, Spotlight win Oscars

By Esra Kaymak Avci

WASHINGTON

After five unsuccessful nominations, actor Leonardo DiCaprio won Sunday night the Oscar award for best actor for his role in The Revenant at the 88th Academy Awards in Los Angeles.

The Revenant has Leonardo DiCaprio, 41, playing the role of a frontiersman in the 19th century who, following a bear attack, is left for dead in the wilderness.

The Revenant’s Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu won the best director for the second year in a row. Last year, he won the same prize for Birdman. Inarritu is the first to win the award consecutively since Joseph Mankiewicz in 1949-50.

Spotlight won the best picture award. The movie details a journalist investigation on a sex abuse scandal in Boston involving the Catholic church. The movie also won the best original screenplay Oscar.

In the best actress category, Brie Larson won for her performance in Room.

Mark Rylance won best supporting actor for his performance as a Soviet agent in Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies.

Alicia Vikander won best supporting actress for her role in The Danish Girl, in which she played an artist married to a man who begins to identify himself as a woman.

The movie Mad Max: Fury Road dominated the more technical categories, winning six Oscars in costume design, production design, makeup, film editing, sound editing and sound mixing.

Sam Smith's Writing on the Wall, from the James Bond film Spectre, won the best song award.

Ennio Morricone, the composer of films such as The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and The Untouchables, won the best original score Oscar for Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight.

In foreign language films category, Son of Saul from Hungary was awarded the Oscar. The Franco-Turkish co-production Mustang by Deniz Gamze Erguven was also one of the nominees.

However, Sunday night's show was not all about the awards.

The show kicked off with the host Chris Rock's highly anticipated monologue in an awards ceremony, in which no African-Americans were nominated

Wearing a white tuxedo, Chris Rock, a black comedian, called the awards as "the White People's Choice Awards", while demonstrations supporting diversity were taking place not only in front of the Dolby Theatre, where the awards ceremony were taking place, but also throughout the U.S.

This was second year in a row that nominations included no African-Americans.

Since the nominations were announced in mid-January, director Spike Lee and actress Jada Pinkett Smith, announced that they would not attend the show.

Throughout Sunday night, the issue came up several times.

"Is Hollywood racist? You're damn right it's racist," said Rock. "Hollywood is sorority racist."

Rock confessed he deliberated to join the boycott of the Oscars and bow out as host, but concluded: "The last thing I need is to lose another job to Kevin Hart," referring to another African-American comedian.

Noting the lack of black nominees through Oscar history, he pointed out that in the 60s, "black people" did not protest because they had "real things to protest at the time".

"We were too busy being raped and lynched to worry about best cinematography," Rock said.