Oscars 2021: Nomadland wins best picture Academy Award

Nomadland, a recession-era tale about a community of van dwellers in the American West, has won the Oscar for best picture while Frances McDormand and Anthony Hopkins have taken out best actress and actor.

British actor Hopkins won his second Oscar for his heart-wrenching performance as a man with dementia in The Father.

The 83-year-old has a six-decade film, TV and stage career but is perhaps best known for playing the brilliant but twisted murderer Hannibal Lecter in the 1991 thriller The Silence of the Lambs, for which he won his first Oscar.

His best lead actor win makes him the oldest actor to get an Academy Award, an honor previously held by the late Christopher Plummer.

Nomadland featured McDormand as a widow in a depressed Nevada mining town who turns her van into a mobile home and sets out on the road, taking seasonal jobs and making friends along the way.

Directed by China native Chloe Zhao, it was widely considered front-runner heading into Hollywood’s biggest night, having dominated this year’s awards season.

The film is based on a 2017 nonfiction book by Jessica Bruder and features real- life nomads in supporting roles as fictionalised versions of themselves.

It’s the second best actress Oscar for McDormand, who also won in 2018 for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.

China native Chloe Zhao was earlier named best director in a historic win making her the first Asian woman and only the second woman to take home the trophy.

Youn Yuh-jung won the best supporting actress Oscar for her role as a cantankerous grandmother in immigrant tale Minari.

Youn, 73, is the first South Korean actor or actress to win an Oscar in what is shaping as a milestone night for people of colour, as well as a return to glamour and in-person celebrations after a year of virtual ceremonies.

“Me being here, I cannot believe it,” Youn said. She joked about people mispronouncing her name, adding, “Tonight you are all forgiven.”

Zhao, 39, won for Nomadland about the travelling van community in modern America. She called making the film a “crazy, once-in-a-lifetime journey”.

It has been 11 years since Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win the director Oscar, for Iraq war drama The Hurt Locker.

Zhao’s win added momentum to an expected best picture win for Nomadland later on Sunday.

Zhao, who now lives in the United States, recalled growing up in China, where she came to believe “people at birth are inherently good”.

“This is for anyone who has the faith and the courage to hold on to the goodness in themselves ... and in each other,” she added.

Britain’s Daniel Kaluuya was named best supporting actor for his role as 1960s Black Panther activist Fred Hampton in Judas and the Black Messiah.

The movie Soul, the first from Pixar to feature a black lead character, won best animated feature.

Social distancing forced a rethink of the ceremony, moving it to Union Station in downtown Los Angeles.

After strict COVID-19 testing and quarantine protocols, most celebrities were not wearing masks and were shown chatting in an outdoor courtyard ahead of the ceremony, which took place on a nightclub-style set inside the Mission Revival- style train station.

Celebrities were delighted to be back together in the same room.

“It’s an amazing party! I was surprised. We haven’t had that,” Margot Robbie told reporters before the show began.

The Australian’s production company, LuckyChap Entertainment, earned recognition as backer of Promising Woman, whose British writer and director, Emerald Fennell, won the first Oscar of the night for best original screenplay.

Travon Free, co-director of the live-action short winner Two Perfect Strangers, wore a suit jacket lined with the names of those killed by police. His film dramatizes police brutality as an inescapable time loop like a tragic Groundhog’s Day for Black Americans.

“Today, the police will kill three people. And tomorrow, the police will kill three people. And the day after that, the police will kill three people because on average, the police in America everyday kill three people, which amounts to about a thousand people a year,” said Free.

“Those people happen to disproportionately be Black people.”

Years after the Academy Awards were harshly criticized as “OscarsSoWhite” — and after the film academy’s membership was overhauled — a historically diverse slate of nominees led to record firsts in many categories.

Hairstylists Mia Neal and Jamika Wilson of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom became the first Black women to win in makeup and hairstyling. Ann Roth, at 89 one of the oldest Oscar winners ever, also won for the film’s costume design.

The night’s first winner was Emerald Fennell, the writer-director of the provocative revenge thriller Promising Young Woman, for best screenplay.

Fennell, winning for her feature debut, is the first woman win solo in the category since Diablo Cody (Juno) in 2007.

The broadcast instantly looked different. It’s being shot in 24 frames-per-second and in more widescreen format. In a more intimate show without an audience beyond nominees, winners were given wider latitude in their speeches.

“It has been quite a year and we are still smack dab in the middle of it,” King said in the opening.

King explained how Sunday’s Oscars were even possible — testing, vaccinations, social distancing and more testing. The safety protocols, she said, echoed those of film shoots during the pandemic.

“When we’re rolling, masks on,” said King. “When we’re not, masks off.”

The telecast, produced by a team led by filmmaker Steven Soderbergh, moved out of the awards’ usual home, the Dolby Theatre, for Union Station.

With Zoom ruled out for nominees, the telecast included satellite feeds from around the world. Performances of the song nominees were pretaped and aired during the preshow, including Husavik (My Hometown) from Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga., in the Iceland town’s harbor.

Other performances were made from the top of the film academy’s new $500 million museum.

Pixar notched its 11th best animated feature Oscar with Soul, the studio’s first feature with a Black protagonist. Peter Docter’s film, about a about middle-school music teacher (Jamie Foxx), was one of the few big-budget movies in the running at the Academy Awards, and its victory came over another Pixar nominee, Onward. Apple, seeking its first Oscar, had put a lot of muscle behind the acclaimed Irish underdog Wolfwalkers, but the Pixar juggernaut proved too tough to beat.

Best adapted screenplay went to the dementia drama The Father. Danish director Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round won best international film.

The red carpet was back, minus the throngs of onlookers and with socially distanced interviews. Only a handful of media outlets were allowed on site, behind a velvet rope and some distance from the nominees.

Casual wear, the academy warned nominees early on, was a no-no. During the Oscar pre-show, nominees gathered at an outdoor set at Union Station that resembled an open-air cocktail lounge.

But even good show may not be enough to save the Oscars from an expected ratings slide.

Award show ratings have cratered during the pandemic, and this year’s nominees — many of them smaller, lower-budget dramas — won’t come close to the drawing power of past Oscar heavyweights like Titanic or Black Panther.

Last year’s Oscars, when Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite became the first non-English language film to win best picture, was watched by 23.6 million, an all-time low.

Netflix dominated this year with 36 nominations, including the lead-nominee Mank, David Fincher’s black-and-white drama about Citizen Kane co-writer Herman J. Mankiewicz.

The streamer is still pursuing its first best-picture win; this year, its best shot may be Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7. But the night’s top prize, best picture, is widely expected to go to Zhao’s Nomadland.

Sunday’s pandemic-delayed Oscars bring to a close the longest awards season ever — one that turned the season’s industrial complex of cocktail parties and screenings virtual.

Eligibility was extended into February of this year, and for the first time, a theatrical run wasn’t a requirement of nominees. Some films — like Sound of Metal — premiered all the way back in September 2019. The biggest ticket-seller of the best picture nominees is Promising Young Woman, with $6.3 million in box office.

Lately, with vaccinations expanding, signs of life have begun to show in movie theatres — most of which are operating at 50 per cent capacity. But it’s been a punishing year for Hollywood. Around the world, movie theatre marquees replaced movie titles with pleas to wear a mask. Streaming services rushed to fill the void, redrawing the balance between studios and theatres. Just weeks before the Oscars, one of Los Angeles’ most iconic theatres, the Cinerama Dome, along with ArcLight Cinemas, went out of business.

After the pandemic, Hollywood — and the Oscars — may not ever be quite the same. Or as WarnerMedia’s new chief executive Jason Kilar said when announcing plans to shift the studio’s movies to streaming: “We’re not in Kansas anymore.”

NOMINATIONS/WINNERS FOR THE 93rd ACADEMY AWARDS

BEST PICTURE

Nomadland

BEST ACTOR

Sir Anthony Hopkins (The Father)

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Daniel Kaluuya (Judas And The Black Messiah)

BEST ACTRESS

Frances McDormand (Nomadland)

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Yuh-Jung Youn (Minari)

BEST DIRECTOR

Chloe Zhao (Nomadland)

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE FILM

Soul

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

Erik Messerschmidt (Mank)

BEST FILM EDITING

Mikkel EG Nielsen (Sound Of Metal)

BEST COSTUME DESIGN

Ann Roth (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom)

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE

Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross and Jon Batiste (Soul)

BEST ORIGINAL SONG

Fight For You (Judas And The Black Messiah)

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

The Father

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

Promising Young Woman

BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN

Mank

BEST MAKE-UP AND HAIRSTYLING

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom

BEST SOUND

Sound Of Metal

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS

Tenet

BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE

My Octopus Teacher

BEST INTERNATIONAL FEATURE

Another Round (Denmark)

BEST ANIMATED SHORT

If Anything Happens I Love You

BEST DOCUMENTARY SHORT

Colette