academy awards

The greatest outrage stirred by last week’s announcement of the Oscar nominees was not the Best Picture snub for Carol or the absurd exclusion of Todd Haynes from the Best Director category, but rather the troubling homogeneity of the twenty men and women nominated in the acting categories. Specifically, many have taken issue with the fact that this year’s Oscar slate looks about as white as a Whole Foods before noon on a Sunday. The social media hashtag OscarsSoWhite resurfaced within minutes after the nomination announcement had finished, and Spike Lee has even called for a boycott of the ceremony as a response to the blatant lack of diversity in this year’s picks.

One of the few unquestioned highlights of this year’s Academy Awards was the live performance of Best Original Song nominee “Everything is Awesome” from The LEGO Movie. Tegan and Sara and the Lonely Island performed, Oprah got her very own LEGO Oscar, and Will Arnett moaned about darkness and no parents while wearing Val Kilmer’s Batsuit from Batman Forever. It was a great moment, but one that was totally out of touch with the spirit of the evening. According to almost every pundit and critic, everything was decidedly not awesome about the 87th Oscars.

With the success of the Academy Award-winning movie "Birdman," I was reminded at just how much I have enjoyed Michael Keaton movies over the last 30+ years. Keaton played the role of Riggan who is the main character of the 2014 winner of "Best Picture" at the Oscars last night...

This Sunday’s Oscars will be the 87th annual Academy Awards. In nearly a century of honoring Hollywood’s best, the Academy has sometimes has made some bold choices, and some dumb choices. This gallery has them all; the complete history of nine decades of Best Picture winners in pictures. Some are classics, still watched to this day. A few are almost totally forgotten to history. (Cavalcade, anyone?) But they all won. Even Crash, somehow.

Okay, so there was a fair amount of disappointment around the 2015 Academy Award nominations. Everything was not awesome for ‘The Lego Movie,’ robbed of a Best Animated Movie nod, and David Oyelowo’s dreams of a Best Actor nomination vanished when Steve Carell and Bradley Cooper’s names were mentioned instead. ‘Force Majeure’ got snubbed for a Best Foreign Language Film nomination and ‘Selma’’s Ava Duvernay was robbed in the Best Director Category. I just keep looking at the list of nominations and playing “Sad Trombone” over and over again. It’s basically the official theme song of the 2015 Academy Awards.