Peter, Tripp, Thomas and I would love to thank you all for reading our humble comments for the last year regarding the Academy Awards for 2015. Your interest in our work make all of this possible and enjoyable.

I asked each of our contributors to write a few words on this year’s telecast, winners and anything else they wanted to. Some wrote short essays some (like me) wrote longer ones. All season, we’ve been posting information and commentary from our contributors in the order they becoming a part of the Cinema Sight family. For this final article on the 88th Oscars, we’re going in reverse order. Thomas LaTourrette will start things off, followed by Tripp Burton, then Peter J. Patrick and finally yours truly.

Thomas LaTourrette

It’s always nice to realize that the Academy can still surprise, and there were a few mostly good ones Sunday night.

Spotlight had won the cast award from SAG, but had seemingly fallen out of favor to either PGA winner The Big Short or DGA winner The Revenant. In the past when all three guilds had split their votes, either the PGA or DGA winner had gone on to win. Score one to the Screen Actors Guild for guessing correctly. I was pleased that what I thought was the most deserving film of the three was the winner. People at my party and those attending the actual awards seemed shocked but pleased. It was a striking end to the evening.

The Academy also got it right when they awarded Mark Rylance Best Supporting Actor for Bridge of Spies over the expected Sylvester Stallone. Personally, I would have preferred any of the nominees to win over Stallone, but they chose a strong performance from a relatively unknown British stage actor. Even after his BAFTA win, where he was not competing against Stallone, I did not think Rylance stood much of a chance. It was cool to see the right man win.

Unfortunately, the Academy got it wrong when they gave Best Original Song to “Writing’s on the Wall,” the theme from the most recent James Bond film. Both the film and the song were a bit anemic, but it was a film that would have been more widely seen than the documentary that contained the Diane Warren and Lady Gaga anthem. It was especially hard to see Writing’s win after Lady Gaga’s exciting, if overwrought, rendition of her song. (I also object to the Academy for not allowing the two songs not sung by celebrities to be heard in their entirety at the ceremony. That was offensive.) The expected win by Ennio Morricone may have produced a nice Oscar moment, but it definitely felt like a career award rather than a deserved one.

Leonardo DiCaprio also won a career acheivement award. He was good in The Revenant, but he has been better in other films. It may not have been the strongest year for leading male performances, though Michael Fassbender’s portrayal of Steve Jobs will probably be longer remembered than Leo’s. The Academy is wont to do this, but it was surprising how quickly Leo was anointed to be the recipient this year. It is always more interesting if there is a race, though as Stallone learned, nothing is a guaranteed sure bet. One could also wonder where the music to play Leo off after his allotted 45 seconds were up, though maybe some stars will just not get the same treatment.

As surprising as Rylance’s victory over Stallone was, the biggest upset of the night was Ex Machina winning for Best Visual Effects over much more popular films. I have no problems with it winning, but I would have expected it to be in last place considering its higher grossing and more widely known competitors. It is the first film without a nomination to beat a Best Picture nominee in this category in 45 years. It is also the first film to win this award without having a single nomination from the Visual Effects Society. I had thought the surprises were over for the evening, but the awards for Supporting Actor and Picture proved that was not the case.

I am still surprised by the total haul of Mad Max: Fury Road. It was a well made movie and one I ended up enjoying, but it certainly was not one I expected to be the big winner of the night. Only 26 films have won more awards than its six. It had twice the awards of the next film, and certainly showed that the love of The Revenant was not as strong as expected. Most of its awards were deserved, though the Costume and Sound ones could have as easily gone to other films.

Most of the other awards went as predicted. Some, like Brie Larson’s win for Room were totally expected, even if I was vainly hoping that Saorise Ronan would stage an upset for her work in Brooklyn. Stutterer was not really expected to take the Live-Action Short award, but it was charming and the one I hoped would win. Bear Story, which won for Animated Short Film, was beautifully done, though I thought it would lose to more talked about fare. The short documentary, A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness, was the correct winner. The screenplays for Spotlight and The Big Short also deservedly won.

All in all, it was a decent year for the awards and the show in general. Chris Rock was a good host with some very clever zingers, though a couple big duds, even if he left out Latinos and Asians as others that could have been nominated. I don’t know if he will be back as host, but he did a good job. And I loved the fact that there were some surprises in a year when most awards had felt predetermined. It may not have been the speediest Oscars on record, but when there is an upset at the end of the evening, it makes it worthwhile to have watched.

Tripp Burton

Well, one of the strangest Oscar seasons ended with a bang, not only from a successful broadcast but from an awards ceremony that spread the wealth pretty well while giving us some genuine surprises. Seven years into the Best Picture expansion, we had another Picture/Director split (the third in four years) and the first Picture/Director/Editing split since 1981. If we learned anything Sunday night it is that anything can happen these days, and a lot of our most steadfast rules and predictors aren’t holding up like they used to. Although it could also be to go back to December and stick to our guns. If someone had told me in December that the winners would be Spotlight/Inarritu/DiCaprio/Larson/Rylance/Vikander, I would have said “yeah, you’re probably right.” For all the shifting and debating we did, things fell right back into place in the end.

Perhaps the other big lesson to learn is that the Oscar voters don’t love a comeback as much as internet bloggers think they do: after Lauren Bacall, Burt Reynolds, Eddie Murphy and Mickey Rourke, Sylvester Stallone also came up empty-handed. The comeback, especially when it comes with as much baggage as some of these actors have, is not a good path to an Oscar.

The biggest surprises of the evening were centered mostly on the fringes: Ex Machina for Visual Effects and “Writings on the Wall” for Song. Spotlight, which many of us thought of as the one-time frontrunner that had fallen from grace, ended up with the biggest prize of the evening. We need to continue to remember that in the midst of a preferential ballot, the film the most people like (even if they don’t love it) will reign supreme.

Peter J. Patrick

The show got off to a good start with Chris Rock’s monologue, the best the Oscars have had in years. Not everything that followed went as smoothly, but it was better paced than most shows in recent years.

I did well with the major awards – Picture, Direction, Acting, Writing, but was way off on the technical awards.

Spotlight was the best film of the year in my opinion. I thought it would win, but was ready to be disappointed if it didn’t. Tom McCarthy was my choice for Best Director, but I expected him to lose to DGA winner Alejandro G. Inarritu for The Revenant and he did.

I expected Leonardo DiCaprio, Brie Larson, Mark Rylance and Alicia Vikander to take the acting awards, and they did. I was hoping against hope that Mad Max: Fury Road would come up empty-handed although I pretty much knew that was wishful thinking, but for it to take six awards left me feeling like I was trapped in a horror movie and couldn’t get out. Fortunately, I did when the Visual Effects award went to the wonderful Ex Machina.

Wesley Lovell

Every Oscar telecast, we come out with a sense that things aren’t the way they should be. The glitz. The glamor. The gamesmanship. This year’s telecast marked both the best and the worst of the Oscars and may be a sign that changes must occur to keep the ceremony and its winners fresh.

The impact of the precursors was a bit muted this year, but everything began to slide when the Oscar nominations were announced. For the second year in a row, the Academy nominated no minority actors or actresses. Although they were heavily represented in smaller categories, the top ones were surprisingly straight, white, and, unless otherwise impossible, male. Some say the reason for that is the aging nature of the Academy, but that’s a dodge of the issue. The problem is that the film industry itself is unnecessarily segregated. Women struggle to dig into male-dominated professions while blacks, Asians, Hispanics and homosexuals claw their way through minefields to find their places in terms of Hollywood output. The Academy is merely a reflection, a symptom, rather than the cause.

Sensing a publicity nightmare brewing, the Academy made a rash decision to focus on inclusion, seeking out the best minority professionals to bring them into the Academy’s fold. That, alone, is a very noble decision, though one which had already been happening for the last couple of years. Where they tripped up was swapping racism for ageism. In a swift move, the Academy also declared that older members who don’t have the requisite film credits will be purged from the voting membership, installed as little more than at-large members who don’t pay dues, but have no access to making their voices heard. I respect the decision to try and bring more folks under the Academy’s umbrella, but by shifting the blame to the older members, it becomes a different form of prejudice.

Then the Oscar broadcast occurred. While Chris Rock did a terrific job in his opening monologue of highlighting the issue as respectfully as he could, it seemed as the telecast went on that the focus was not on broad diversity, but on targeted diversity. Look no further than the Asian stereotypes employed during the Price Waterhouse Coopers gag or the utterly insensitive presentation by Sacha Baron Cohen against the kidnapping/rape drama Room. For wanting to talk about diversity, the end result was something far more frightening and insidious: ignorance and narrowed focus.

What of that telecast? A clunky, 3-hour slog that tried its best to liven up the tech prizes by presenting them quickly and in rapid succession, but the trade off was that there was only a single instance where the play-off music, a poorly chosen “Ride of the Valkyries,” wasn’t automatically applied. One of the worst examples was when it cut off Best Documentary Short Subject winner Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy as she was discussing the importance of a film like hers on the treatment of women in Pakistan and other countries. It was yet another example of producers wanting to constrict for time rather than constrict for brevity.

The Academy needs to have the telecast return to the days where the play-off music was used sparingly and only for those who were droning incessantly. They need to scrap this whole ticker tape of thanks that was tiny and flashed by too quickly. They need to go back to using themes and musical cues from nominated films or current-year films rather than trying to celebrate the past with themes that might not always bee fitting or recognizable. They need to find a way not to bloat the telecast with needless skits and tributes. Was it really necessary to highlight John Williams’ 50th Oscar nomination when there were two Oscar-nominated original songs left off the telecast due to “time constraints.” What an awful disservice it is to the category and to those individuals for not being famous enough to score slots on the telecast. Producers want viewers, sure, but to search for them at the expense of those who might gain some attention and familiarity through an appearance on one of the top rated telecasts of the year is disrespectful to say the least.

As to the winners, that is a different situation. While the season was shaping up to be a rather predictable affair, and in several cases it was, when it did shock, the selections were largely welcome. The two exceptions to this were Sam Smith’s execrable James Bond theme “Writing’s On the Wall,” winning over the lyrically masterful piece “Til It Happens to You.” As Lady Gaga in her brilliant performance showcased, this was a song of immense and immeasurable emotional impact with a message so strong and vital that its loss, especially to an anti-feminist vehicle like the James Bond franchise only further highlights how diversity in Hollywood only seems to be focused in one direction rather than to a broader view of the industry’s issues.

The second unfortunate surprise wasn’t entirely unwelcome, just a prize that went in the wrong direction. While I have the utmost respect for Ex Machina, what Mad Max: Fury Road and Star Wars: The Force Awakens did with their visual effects were rightly deserving of the award. Both films employed old and new techniques with precision and aplomb. Perhaps the Academy finally wanted to take CGI films to task for the heavy use of it, but the two films that lost employed practical effects heavily rather than the unnecessary use CGI. Maybe voters just wanted to recognize Ex Machina in the only category they could, but it’s more likely that Mad Max and Star Wars were both favored by the same group of individuals, who split their votes between those films and The Revenant and The Martian and thereby allowed the minor box office weakling Ex Machina to claim victory.

I’m glad that Spotlight (or any film for that matter) managed to top The Revenant for Best Picture. The film and its producers had so disgustingly whored themselves out to get the victories they did, it was nice to see voters rejecting that crass self-aggrandizement in favor of recognizing a more competent and significant cinematic achievement. I wish that Mad Max: Fury Road had done better, but six tech prizes, including toss-up categories like Costume Design, Sound Mixing and Sound Editing, is no small feat and puts it in great company for films that never won Best Picture while picking up a raft of prizes. George Miller should have won Best Director, but as previously mentioned, he didn’t have a chance since he wasn’t willing to sell his dignity for the sake of a little golden statuette.

What the Academy needs to do for next year is to start by grandfathering all existing members over a certain age into the 3-decade rule. It wasn’t required for their membership when they joined, so they shouldn’t have it retroactively applied simply because it seems politically expedient. They need to find new and more experienced producers who know how to stage an exciting and suspenseful show. They need to stop treating the faithful Oscars audience like they are unworthy of their attention while focusing on younger audiences who may not understand or appreciate them the way that longtime fans have. They need to find balance between two disparate groups of viewers. They need to find ways to engage the public more quickly throughout the year and build new bridges to new members and new outlets so that it doesn’t just feel stiff, but that it also doesn’t pander to those who likely don’t care.

Progress is fantastic and I’ll be more than happy to see some changes in the near future, but throwing the baby out with the bathwater is a poor way to handle controversy. It’s a poor way to handle a production and it’s a terrible way to treat an institution nearly 90 years old. The Academy needs to embrace its past and explore why that past needs to be honored. The future cannot be built without the foundation of the past, no matter how you try to reinvent or reinvigorate it.