Oscars recap: ‘Spotlight,’ ‘Mad Max’ upset

#OscarSoFunny and #OscarSoSurprising might be two hashtags that could join #OscarSoWhite in the viral Twitterverse following Sunday night’s 88th Academy Awards ceremony.

With host Chris Rock constantly, and often scathingly, riffing on the controversy surrounding the lack of racial diversity in this year’s major acting categories — which is what led to the #OscarSoWhite hashtag and a subsequent boycott started by Jada Pinkett Smith — as well as six wins for Mad Max: Fury Road and a supporting-actor win for Mark Rylance over Sylvester Stallone, it was one of the most entertainingly unpredictable Oscar presentations in a long time.

Spotlight, the film about The Boston Globe’s investigation of abuse by Catholic priests, was named Best Picture, even though it won only one other of the six awards for which it was nominated, original screenplay.

Spotlight beat out Alejandro Iñárritu’s 19th-century revenge drama, The Revenant, which went in as the odds-on favorite. The Revenant had 12 nominations, the most of any film, and Iñárritu won for Best Director, often a sign of what’s to come in the Best Picture category.

To top it off, The Revenant star Leonardo DiCaprio — after five previous nominations — finally got his Oscar in the Best Actor category.

Ultimately, The Revenant won three Oscars, including one for Emmanuel Lubezki for cinematography.

‘Mad Max’ wins

Mad Max: Fury Road scored big in the technical categories. George Miller’s searing vision of post-apocalyptic Australia walked away with six awards: film editing, costume design, makeup and hairstyling, sound mixing, sound editing, and production design. It turned out to be the big winner of the night.

No film dominated the acting winners. In addition to DiCaprio’s win, Brie Larson was recognized for her gripping performance in Room for Best Actress, Alicia Vikander received the supporting-actress nod for The Danish Girl, and, in one of the night’s biggest upsets, Rylance took home the little gold man for Bridge of Spies, beating out Stallone for Creed.

Two of the night’s least-surprising winners were Inside Out for animated feature and Hungary’s Son of Saul for foreign-language film. The Amy Winehouse documentary, simply called Amy, won for documentary feature.

And on this Rock

But all of the “And the Oscar goes to”-ing and “I’d like to thank”-ing took a back seat to wondering what Rock might do.

As expected, the comedian mocked Hollywood casting, saying at the top of the show, “I’m here at the Academy Awards, otherwise known as the White People’s Choice Awards.”

“You realize if they nominated hosts, I wouldn’t even get this job,” he went on. “So y’all would be watching Neil Patrick Harris right now.”

But he spread his humor to those calling for a boycott. He asked why the controversy took off this year instead of, say, in the ’50s or ’60s. “Because we had real things to protest at the time, you know? … We were too busy being raped and lynched to care about who won Best Cinematographer.”

And he didn’t spare Pinkett Smith. “Jada says she’s not coming, protesting. I’m like, ‘Ain’t she on a TV show?’ … Jada’s mad her man Will [Smith] was not nominated for Concussion. … It’s not fair that Will was this good and didn’t get nominated. … It’s also not fair that Will was paid $20 million for Wild Wild West, OK?”

One of the funniest moments was a filmed skit with Whoopi Goldberg, Leslie Jones and others spoofing what some of the nominated films might have been like with black characters — though the end with Stacey Dash may not have made much sense to those who haven’t been keeping up with the boycott controversy.

Still, of course, the whole thing went on too long. There’s no boycott for that.

This story was originally published February 28, 2016 at 11:49 PM.