Avatar and The Hurt Locker opened Oscar night competing as the two films with most nominees and, more than half-way through Hollywood’s largest night, are nearly tied with a handful of awards each.
Canadian James Cameron’s 3-D sci-fi blockbuster Avatar has picked up trophies for art direction, cinematography and visual effects.
Kathryn Bigelow’s gritty Iraq war drama The Hurt Locker has won Academy Awards for sound editing, sound mixing, film editing and its original screenplay by Mark Boal, who said he first imagined the tale after covering the Iraq War as a journalist.
Other Oscars were spread out across a host of films.
Austrian actor Christoph Waltz picked up the night’s first trophy: best supporting actor for his turn as the main Nazi villain in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds.
“Quentin, with his unorthodox methods of navigation, this fearless explorer, took this ship across and brought it in with flying colours, and that’s why I’m here,” Waltz said.
“This is your welcoming embrace and there’s no way I can ever thank you enough, but I can start now. Thank you,” Waltz told the audience after thanking Tarantino for taking his career in a new direction.
The Oscar for best supporting actress went to Mo’Nique, who describes a monstrous single mother in Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire.
“I want to thank the academy for showing it can be about the performance and not the politics,” she said.
She also paid tribute to Hattie McDaniel, the Gone With the Wind actress who was the first black performer to win an Oscar; Precious producers Tyler Perry and Oprah Winfrey; and her husband, Sidney Hicks, “for showing me that … you have to forgo doing what’s well loved to do what’s right and, baby, you were so right.”
Precious was a double winner, with Geoffrey Fletcher nabbing its second Academy Award for his script adaptation of poet Sapphire’s tale.
Also scoring two trophies was Up, winner of the best animated feature Oscar and best original score. It also vies for the best picture prize later in the evening — only the second animated film to get a nod in the top category, after Beauty and the Beast in 1991.
Ryan Bingham and T Bone Burnett picked up the night’s third Academy Award for The Weary Kind, their theme song from country music comeback tale Crazy Heart.
Other winners included:
- Make-up: Star Trek
- Documentary small: Music by Prudence
- Animated small: Logorama
- Live action small: The New Tenants
- Costume design: The Young Victoria
- Documentary feature: The Cove
- Foreign language film: El Secreto de Sus Ojos (Argentina)
The Academy Awards show also took a few breaks for tributes: to horror films, to honorary Oscar-winners Lauren Bacall and Roger Corman, to the annual list of Hollywood figures who have passed away as well as a tender, stand-alone homage to John Hughes, with actors from some of his largest films speaking as part of a tribute to the late U.S. producer, director and screenwriter.
Molly Ringwald, Matthew Broderick, Ally Sheedy and Macaulay Culkin were among those who spoke about Hughes — who died in August 2009 — as a montage of his many teen and family comedy-dramas rolled on screens behind them, including Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, The Breakfast Club, Some Kind of Wonderful, Home Alone, Weird Science and Planes, Trains and Automobiles.
The 82nd annual awards show opened with a song-and-dance number by Neil Patrick Harris and playful ribbing of this year’s nominees by hosts Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin.
This year’s expanded best picture race will see Cameron’s Avatar contend with ex-wife Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, along with:
- Alien thriller District 9.
- Mid-century coming-of-age tale An Education.
- Football drama The Blind Side.
- World War II tale Inglourious Basterds.
- Urban drama Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire.
- Animated adventure tale Up.
- Downsizing comedy-drama Up in the Air.
- Black comedy A Serious Man.
Replicas of Oscar statuettes are seen on show in a shop in front of the Kodak Theatre. (Gabriel Bouys/AFP/Getty Images)
With files from The Associated Press
