2016 Oscars

Alicia Vikander won Best Supporting Actress at the 2016 Oscar for her performance in The Danish Girl, beating out fellow nominees Jennifer Jason Leigh, Rooney Mara, Rachel McAdams and Kate Winslet.

With the #OscarsSoWhite controversy, all eyes where on 2016 Oscars host Chris Rock as he returned to add a little diversity to this year’s Academy Awards, and he did not disappoint.

We made it! The Oscars have finally arrived, and we can finally stop speculating on who will win (see our predictions here!) because the Oscar winners are presented tonight.

Ready for the Oscars this Sunday? Need help winning your Oscar pool? The ScreenCrush staff — Editor-in-Chief Mike Sampson, Managing Editor Matt Singer and Senior Editor Erin Whitney — are here to help, or at least try their best anyway. They’ve seen all the movies (yes, even those documentary shorts!) and have come back with a definitive list of who will win at the 2016 Oscars. Normally these lists might have a lot of disparity, but strangely this year’s panel of experts largely agrees on the winners. That could mean good things for you and your office pool. Follow these selections to Oscar glory and bring home all the spoils. Or, come back on Monday morning to yell at them for they gave you really bad advice.

In 2014, Ava DuVernay got the cold shoulder from the Academy of Motion Picture Sciences when they nominated her skillfully-directed, socially urgent, crowd-pleasing Selma for Best Picture but passed over her for Best Director consideration in favor of The Imitation Game director Morten Tyldum, among others...

If you’ll believe it, and all it takes is a quick jaunt into the comments section on any major entertainment-news web site (except this one, whose commenters are perfect and good-looking) to make you believe it, there are some folks out there who remain unconvinced that there’s a problem of homogeneity in Hollywood. These folks stuck to their convictions, unswayed by this year’s all-white slate of Oscar nominees that the American film industry has been giving actors of color the short shrift. But even if we concede that there were no performances from black actors deserving of a nomination this year, which is false and not true, what of the fact that a minuscule percentage of annual studio releases feature black performers in headlining roles? Black-fronted films aren’t moneymakers, and a movie studio is a business above all things, comes the factually inaccurate and vaguely racist reply. (See: The Force Awakens.)

In my experience there is only one way to win an Oscar pool. You’ve got to sweep the shorts categories.

Leonardo DiCaprio has never won an Oscar. We’ve heard this narrative time and time again, especially as he inches closer and closer to finally winning an Academy Award for his work in The Revenant, but it’s time for us as a people to stand up and do something about it. OK, maybe just sit down and do something about it. And by “do something” we mean play a video game. Yes, in Leo’s Red Carpet Rampage, you can finally help the unlucky actor chase down that elusive Oscar. If only you can avoid getting bumped by Lady Gaga.

Yesterday, at the annual Oscar Nominees Luncheon hosted by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, the organization pulled back the curtain on a new innovation designed to streamline acceptance speeches.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts may have announced sweeping changes to their membership and governing board that will take effect next year, but that hasn’t changed much about the state of this year’s Oscar race, or the conversation around its lack of diversity. Ian McKellen is the latest actor to weigh in on the controversy surrounding 2016’s nominees and their total and all-consuming whiteness. He had some very powerful things to say.