The 10 Biggest Surprises Of The 2016 Oscars

The 2016 Oscars should go down as one of the best in years. Hosted by Chris Rock over what felt like a more tolerable than usual three-and-a-half hours, the ceremony this year went off basically without a hitch, with many of the categories ending up just as predicted. The Oscars wouldn't be the Oscars, though, if there weren't any surprises in store. Just what would be the point in the Academy Awards if there wasn't room for a comedy vox pop set in Compton, or for Joe Biden and Ali G to just show up out of nowhere (FYI both of those things happened this year), or for the awards to end up in the hands of completely unexpected winners? On that note, here are the ten biggest surprises of the Oscars that caught us all off guard. 10) Chris Rock Kills It Maybe this shouldn't have been a big surprise. Chris Rock is a fine comedian who is most at home doing stand-up (which the Oscars hosting gig basically is), and the #OscarsSoWhite controversy offered a wealth of material for him to tackle. But Rock's last time hosting, in 2005, produced mixed results, with the nadir being Sean Penn sassing Rock live on-air. This year, however, Rock absolutely delivered. His opening monologue was one of the best for a while, while even the dreaded sketches used to pad out the interminably long ceremony landed well, with Rock owning Hollywood on its diversity problem. After years of overly-fawning or just generally terrible hosts, Rock was the real deal. 9) Politics, Politics Everywhere With #OscarsSoWhite being an inevitable elephant in the room, and with Rock set to skewer the Academy for its record on racial diversity, the 2016 Oscars was always bound to be a little bit political. Surprisingly, the ceremony turned out to be even more topical than expected, with artists using their speeches to reference everything from gender equality, to climate change, to LGBT rights. The Big Short writer-director Adam McKay accepted his Adapted Screenplay award with a dig at certain presidential runners ("don’t vote for candidates that take money from big banks, oil or weirdo billionaires"), while Leonardo DiCaprio warned of the dangers of global warming in his Best Actor speech. Anyone hoping for mere light entertainment instead got hours of being reminded the world needs a makeover. 8) Chivo Lubezki Wins Third Cinematography Oscar, Ruins Roger Deakins' Night Once Again Perhaps it's a stretch to say Emmanuel Lubezki's Oscar win for Best Cinematography for The Revenant was a 'surprise.' The stars certainly seemed to be aligning that way, as he'd cleaned up at pretty much every major awards ceremony leading up the Oscars last night. But three Oscars for Cinematography three years in a row - that's still a shock no matter how you look at it. Pity poor Roger Deakins, who after 13 Oscar nominations has still never won, and has for the third year running been beaten by 'Chivo' Lubezki to the prize. There was some speculation that Deakins might win this year as a kind of sympathy nod, and for the fact that he valiantly keeps turning up to the ceremony despite constantly losing. Alas, Lubezki took home the gold once more. 7) Witness! Mad Max Is The Biggest Winner Of The Night The 2016 Oscars must have been doubly hard for Roger Deakins to swallow, as while he's been patiently waiting 21 years for his first award, Mad Max: Fury Road casually racked up six wins in just a couple of hours. While nobody ever expected Fury Road to be crowned Best Picture, the film still managed to perform even better in its other categories than predicted. Overall, Fury Road took home six Oscars, including one for Editing - an award The Big Short was expected to win - and Costume Design, with the better-favored period pieces like The Danish Girl and Carol missing out. With all said and done, Mad Max: Fury Road was the biggest winner of the night, with six nods to closest rival The Revenant's three. 6) Best Visual Effects Goes To Ex Machina, The Cheapest In The Category One award that Fury Road perhaps surprisingly didn't win was for Best Visual Effects, with its streak being momentarily broken by the darkest horse in that race. The frontrunners for Visual Effects included The Force Awakens, The Martian and The Revenant along with Fury Road, all high-grossing films that feature well-regarded VFX. Oddly enough, they were all beaten by Ex Machina, a film which uses special effects sparingly, which cost just $15 million to make, and which grossed not even $40 million at the world box office. Usually the Visual Effects category is reserved for blockbusters like Interstellar and Gravity (the two previous winners), so Ex Machina winning was the heartwarming underdog story of the night. 5) The In Memoriam Section Forgets Who Died Last Year The people handling the In Memoriam section of the Oscars often cause uproar, mainly due to the fact that they seemingly lose track every year of who's died and who hasn't. This year those left off the list included Juliette Lewis' actor father Geoffrey Lewis and They Live's bubblegum-chewing Roddy Piper, as well as popular Godfather star Abe Vigoda. The In Memoriam insanity wasn't just limited to actors in 2016, however. Also missing from the tribute reel were French New Wave icon Jacques Rivette and Manoel de Oliveira, who was the oldest living filmmaker (he was 106 and still making movies, so what's your excuse?). Tune in next year, when the In Memoriam reel includes Alan Rickman again, because the producers forget they covered him already. 4) Sam Smith Wins Best Original Song Despite Making The Worst Original Song To the complete and utter bemusement of critics, Sam Smith did more than just get nominated for his woeful Bond theme Writing's "On The Wall" - he actually won Best Original Song for it last night. Granted, he wasn't exactly faced with stiff competition, but Smith's Spectre track has been widely derided as one of the worst Bond themes ever. To sum up the general feeling of the critical community towards Smith's win, here's a tweet from Vulture's Bilge Ebiri: "Great performance of a great song from a great, important movie. It'd be nice if it didn't lose to that garbage Sam Smith song from SPECTRE." Imagine that sentiment repeated literally thousands of times, and you get the picture. 3) Carol, Brooklyn, The Martian And The Force Awakens All Win Nothing As sure as there are winners, there also always have to be losers at the Academy Awards. This year, a few big-name movies went home completely empty-handed: Carol, nominated for six awards; Brooklyn, nominated for three; and Star Wars: The Force Awakens, nominated for five. They all got bupkis. Perhaps most surprising is that The Martian didn't even make a dent, so soon after winning Best Picture and Best Actor at the Golden Globes and despite being up for seven Oscars at this year's ceremony. The closest the movie came to recognition was all the times the camera cut to whitest man in the room, Matt Damon, laughing awkwardly at Chris Rock's jokes. 2) Mark Rylance Beats Sly To Best Supporting Actor Pretty much everyone was in agreement in the run-up to this year's Awards: after DiCaprio, the performer who most had their acting category clinched was Sly Stallone. Everybody just accepted it as a given that Stallone would be taking the Best Supporting Actor trophy home for Creed, as much a career award as a recognition of his talents in that film. But holy shit, what's this? Bridge of Spies, a film which lost out in every single one of its six categories except for one, caused one of the biggest upsets of the night through its star Mark Rylance besting Stallone in the Supporting Actor race. No one would call it undeserved, but it's hard to find anyone who actually predicted this one correctly. 1) Academy Gives Middle Finger To The Revenant, Hands Spotlight Best Picture The race for Best Picture seemingly came full circle last night, as Spotlight - the early frontrunner that fell behind The Martian, then The Big Short, then The Revenant in the race - beat Golden Globe winners The Martian and The Revenant and PGA Best Picture winner The Big Short to be crowned 2016's best film. This was a shocker, as The Revenant had in recent weeks become the most obvious candidate to take home Best Picture. The Academy likes to reward box office as well as critical success, meaning The Revenant ($400 million and counting) seemingly had the edge on Spotlight ($59 million). In the end though, the Academy said expectations be damned, and gave Spotlight its top honor in 2016.