Francesca Steele

Oscars 2015: Neil Patrick Harris took it too far

Birdman soared past longtime favourite Boyhood at the 87th Academy Awards, as Alejandro González Iñárritu’s hilarious Hollywood satire unexpectedly took both of the top prizes – best picture and director – and joint top number of awards overall, in a slightly awkward ceremony where many of the host’s razor-edged jokes drew clear disapproval from the audience.

While many were predicting a slightly irreverent evening, Neil Patrick Harris, a veteran host of the Tony Awards, arguably took his jokes at the podium too far. Following a punchy opener chastising the Academy for the lack of ethnic diversity among this year’s nominees (the 20 acting nominations all went to white actors for just the second time in nearly two decades), he went on to direct jokes at black actors in the audience, including Oprah Winfrey, Octavia Spencer and David Oyelowo, none of whom looked amused.

Birdman’s star, Michael Keaton, lost out in the hotly contested best actor category to Eddie Redmayne, who won for his sensitive and intelligent performance as the wheelchair-bound physicist Stephen Hawking in the British film The Theory of Everything, while Julianne Moore finally joined the Academy’s honour roll, taking best actress for Still Alice, in which she plays an academic with early onset Alzheimer’s. Though victory for playing disabled characters is something of an Oscars cliché, in this case both were well deserved.

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Eddie Redmayne accepts his award from Cate Blanchett Picture: ROBYN BECK/AFP/Getty Images

Richard Linklater’s much-loved coming-of-age tale Boyhood, filmed over 12 years, went home nearly empty-handed, save for the best supporting actress award won by Patricia Arquette, who used her speech to call for equal pay for women.

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