ARGO Wins Best Picture Oscar, LIFE OF PI Top Winner With 4 Oscars

Ang Lee’s tale of survival on the open seas Life Of Pi was the big winner at this evening’s Academy Awards, taking home four Oscar statues including Best Director. Ben Affleck’s Argo, a telling of the real-life CIA operation that extracted a handful of US embassy workers at the beginning of the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979, won three Oscars including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay.

This year was one of those where no one film swept a majority of the Oscar categories. The adaptation of the Broadway musical Les Miserables also won three Academy Awards while Steven Spielberg’s historical drama Lincoln, Quentin Tarantino’s tale of revenge and slavery Django Unchained and the latest James Bond adventure Skyfall all won two Oscars.

Animation studio Pixar continued its domination in the animation category, scooping up the award for Best Animated Feature for Brave.

As always, there were a number of memorable moments and historic firsts during the three-and-a-half hour telecast. With his win for portraying the 16th president in Lincoln, Daniel Day-Lewis becomes the first actor to earn three Oscar statues in the Best Actor category, while documentary Short Subject winner Inocente is the first film to have been funded by Kickstarter to win an Oscar.

For only the sixth time in Oscar history, there was a tie in one of the categories, with both Zero Dark Thirty and Skyfall getting awards for Sound Editing. Previous ties in Academy history include the one in 1932 in the Best Actor category and 1968’s Best Actress dual win. There have also been two ties in the short film categories and once in the feature documentary category in 1986 with Artie Shaw: Time Is All You’ve Got and Down And Out In America.

Tarantino, upon receiving his Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for Django Unchained magnanimously saluted all the nominees in both writing categories declaring 2012 as “the Year of the Writer!”

The complete list of winners is as follows –

Picture – Argo
Director – Ang Lee, Life Of Pi
Actor – Daniel Day-Lewis, Lincoln
Actress – Jennifer Lawrence, Silver Linings Playbook
Supporting Actor – Christoph Waltz, Django Unchained
Supporting Actress – Ann Hathaway, Les Miserables
Original Screenplay – Django Unchained, Written by Quentin Tarantino
Adapted Screenplay – Argo, Screenplay by Chris Terrio
Animated Feature Film – Brave
Animated Short Film – Paperman
Cinematography – Claudio Miranda, Life Of Pi
Costume Design – Jacqueline Durran, Anna Karenina
Documentary Feature – Searching for Sugar Man
Documentary Short Subject – Inocente
Film Editing – William Goldenberg, Argo
Foreign Language Feature – Amour
Live Action Short Film – Curfew
Makeup And Hairstyling – Lisa Westcott and Julie Dartnell, Les Miserables
Original Score – Mychael Danna, Life Of Pi
Original Song – “Skyfall,” Music and Lyric by Adele Adkins and Paul Epworth
Production Design – Production Design: Rick Carter; Set Decoration: Jim Erickson, Lincoln
Sound Editing – (Tie) Paul N J Ottosson, Zero Dark Thirty and Per Hallberg and Karen Baker Landers, Skyfall
Sound Mixing – Andy Nelson, Mark Peterson and Simon Hayes, Les Miserables
Visual Effects – Life Of Pi