'12 Years' wins best picture Oscar

'Gravity' racks up heavy haul with 7 wins

3/2/2014
ASSOCIATED PRESS
  • 86th-Academy-Awards-Show-McQueen

    Director Steve McQueen accepts the award for best picture of the year for ‘12 Years a Slave’ during the Oscars at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles on Sunday.

    INVISION

  • Director Steve McQueen accepts the award for best picture of the year for ‘12 Years a Slave’ during the Oscars at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles on Sunday.
    Director Steve McQueen accepts the award for best picture of the year for ‘12 Years a Slave’ during the Oscars at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles on Sunday.

    LOS ANGELES — The slavery drama 12 Years a Slave won the Academy Award for best picture on Sunday, making history as the first movie from a black director to win the film industry’s highest honor in 86 years of the Oscars.

    OSCAR WINNERS

    A complete list of winners at Sunday’s 86th annual Academy Awards presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

    Best Picture: 12 Years a Slave.

    Actor: Matthew McConaughey, Dallas Buyers Club.

    Actress: Cate Blanchett, Blue Jasmine.

    Supporting Actor: Jared Leto, Dallas Buyers Club.

    Supporting Actress: Lupita Nyong’o, 12 Years a Slave.

    Directing: Alfonso Cuaron, Gravity.

    Foreign Language Film: The Great Beauty, Italy.

    Adapted Screenplay: John Ridley, 12 Years a Slave.

    Original Screenplay: Spike Jonze, Her.

    Animated Feature Film: Frozen.

    Production Design: The Great Gatsby.

    Cinematography: Gravity.

    Sound Mixing: Gravity.

    Sound Editing: Gravity.

    Original Score: Gravity, Steven Price.

    Original Song: "Let It Go" from Frozen.

    Costume: The Great Gatsby.

    Makeup and Hairstyling: Dallas Buyers Club.

    Animated Short Film: Mr. Hublot.

    Documentary Feature: 20 Feet from Stardom.

    Documentary (short subject): The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life.

    Film Editing: Gravity.

    Live Action Short Film: Helium.

    Visual Effects: Gravity.

    Honorary Oscars: Peter W. Anderson; film-processing labs over past century; Angelina Jolie; Angela Lansbury; Steve Martin, and Piero Tosi.

    Matthew McConaughey accepts the award for best actor in a leading role for 'Dallas Buyers Club' during the Oscars.
    Matthew McConaughey accepts the award for best actor in a leading role for 'Dallas Buyers Club' during the Oscars.

    British director Steve McQueen’s unflinching portrayal of pre-Civil War American slavery also won two other Oscars, including best supporting actress for newcomer Lupita Nyong’o and best adapted screenplay based on the memoir of Solomon Northup, a free man sold into slavery in Louisiana.

    Lupita Nyong'­o accepts the award for best actress in a supporting role for
    Lupita Nyong'­o accepts the award for best actress in a supporting role for "12 Years a Slave" during the Oscars.

    “Everyone deserves not just to survive but to live, this is the most important legacy of Solomon Northup,” said McQueen in his acceptance speech.

    Cate Blanchett reacts after winning the award for best actress in a leading role for 'Blue Jasmine' during the Oscars.
    Cate Blanchett reacts after winning the award for best actress in a leading role for 'Blue Jasmine' during the Oscars.

    It prevailed over space thriller Gravity from Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuaron, which nevertheless racked up the most Oscars of the night with seven, including the best director honor for Cuaron, a first for a Latin American director.

    Gravity, starring Sandra Bullock as a stranded astronaut, swept the technical awards like visual effects and cinematography, a reward for its groundbreaking work on conveying space and weightlessness.

    In one of the strongest years for film in recent memory, the 6,000-plus voters of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences scattered golden Oscar statuettes among the many acclaimed movies in contention.

    It was a good night for the scrappy, low-budget film Dallas Buyers Club, a biopic of an early AIDS activist two decades in the making that won three Oscars, including the two male acting awards.

    Matthew McConaughey, in a validation of a remarkable career turnaround, won best actor for his portrayal of the homophobe turned AIDS victim turned treatment crusader Ron Woodroof, a role for which he lost 50 pounds.

    His co-star, Jared Leto, won best supporting actor for his role as Woodroof’s unlikely business sidekick, the transgender woman Rayon, for which he also slimmed down drastically.

    “First off, I want to thank God, because that's who I look up to,” McConaughey said accepting the award. “He’s graced my life with opportunities that I know are not of my hand or any other human hand. He has shown me that it's a scientific fact that gratitude reciprocates.”

    The win is the first Academy Award for McConaughey, 44, once known primarily as the handsome leading man in romantic comedies such as The Wedding Planner and How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days.

    “Whatever it is we look up to, whatever it is we look forward to and whoever it is we're chasing, to that I say, ‘Amen,’ to that I say, ‘Alright, alright, alright,’ McConaughey said, adding his trademark exclamation that drew laughter from the audience, “to that I say just keep living.”

    In recent years, McConaughey has sought more serious roles, winning critical acclaim for movies including The Lincoln Lawyer and Mud, and the HBO TV series True Detective.

    Australia’s Cate Blanchett won the best actress Oscar for her acclaimed role as the socialite unhinged by her husband’s financial crimes in Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine.

    “Thank you so much Woody for casting me,” Blanchett said.

    The tale of Nordic princesses, Frozen, won best animated film, a first for Disney Animation Studios since the category was introduced in 2002.

    Comedian and talk show star Ellen DeGeneres returned as Oscar host on Sunday in an appearance many saw as calculated to project a lighter, more affable tone for Hollywood’s biggest night after the provocative performance of her immediate predecessor, Seth MacFarlane.

    In the comedian’s easy breezy style, DeGeneres mixed with the crowd, taking a star-studded selfie with the likes of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie that broke the record for retweets on Twitter.

    DeGeneres had announced a goal of setting a retweet record with her star-studded selfie, and she achieved it before the Oscars telecast was even over.

    During a comic bit, the Oscars host prevailed upon actor Bradley Cooper to take a picture with her and several other stars crowding around, including Meryl Streep, Jennifer Lawrence, Kevin Spacey, Angelina Jolie, and Brad Pitt.

    Long before midnight Sunday, the photo had been retweeted more than 2 million times, breaking a record set by President Obama with the picture of him hugging First Lady Michelle Obama after his re-election in 2012.

    Twitter also sent out an apology because all of the retweeting disrupted service for more than 20 minutes after 10 p.m.

    DeGeneres also scored points with a pizza delivery bit. That was a real pizza delivery guy, not an actor, who helped her pass out those pies to the Oscar audience.

    The show host met him in a backstage hallway to check out the goods.

    “Is it hot?” she asked him. He assured her it was.

    “What kind we got here?” she asked. Cheese and veggie with no cheese, he told her. “OK. Let’s go!” she said, leading the delivery guy onto the Oscar stage. Brad Pitt helped pass out the pies to hungry and not hungry Hollywood-types.

    The big loser of the night was director David O. Russell’s 1970s crime caper American Hustle, which walked away empty-handed despite earning 10 nominations.

    Kenyan actress Nyong’o was one of the big stars of the night, not only for her winning pale blue Prada gown on the red carpet, but for her touching speech.

    In accepting the first award of the night for 12 Years a Slave, Nyong’o, 31, paid homage to her character.

    “It doesn’t escape me for one moment that so much joy in my life is thanks to so much pain in someone else’s, and so I want to salute the spirit of Patsey, for her guidance,” a tearful Nyong’o told the audience.