On Sunday, March 7, 2010, the 82nd Annual Academy Award show was televised from the Los Angeles Kodak Theatre. The program started with a very funny Las Vegas style musical number performed by Neil Patrick Harris. The hosts, actors Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin, had great comedic chemistry and were able to make jokes at the expense of the stars and directors of films from 2009.
Out of the ten movies nominated for best picture, six of them won Oscars in various categories. The live action-CG animated epic Avatar won three Academy Awards for best art direction, best cinematography, and best visual effects. The poignant animated feature, Up, won two Academy Awards for best-animated film and best original score. Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire, was awarded two Oscars for best-adapted screenplay, and for Monique’s supporting role as a vicious mother.
Quentin Tarantio’s twisted World War II drama, Inglorious Basterds, won one Academy Award for Christoph Waltz’s supporting performance as a conniving SS colonel. The Blind Side was rewarded with one Oscar for Sandra Bullock’s lead performance as a religious southern woman who adopts a future NFL player. Crazy Heart was not nominted for best picture, but it should be noted that Jeff Bridges received the best actor award for his acclaimed role as a country western singer.
The film that won the most awards was the Iraq thriller, The Hurt Locker. It won six academy awards for best picture, best original screenplay, best editing, best sound mixing, best sound editing, and best Director. Kathryn Bigelow was the first woman ever to win an Academy Award for best director.
The late John Hughes was honored during the show. The iconic director had made popular films that include Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Sixteen Candles, Planes Trains and Automobiles, and The Breakfast Club. Actors he helped put on the map including Matthew Broderick, Molly Ringwald, Macaulay Culkin, and Anthony Michael Hall talked about why John was considered such an influential filmmaker.
While the Academy Awards was mostly a success, there were a few strange moments during the night. The lighting and sound system both malfunctioned during certain parts of the telecast. A few clips of the nominated films gave away important plot points. The winner for best foreign language film, The Secret In Their Eyes, was a movie that has not even been released in the States. This is the second year in a row where this has happened in the foreign film category.
However, the weirdest moment happened during the acceptance speech of the Academy Award winning short documentary, Music by Prudenence. While the director and producer Roger Ross Williams was giving his speech, the producer, Elinor Burkett, randomly interrupted him with her own. In an interview with salon.com, Elinor said she disrupted the director, because “the movie was my idea.”
The Academy Awards were a lot of fun to watch and was filled with many memorable speeches and sequences. It was great to see many people involved with movies getting the awards they deserve.