Record night for Australia as Mad Max: Fury Road wins six Oscars

“Mad Max”, directed by George Miller, did strong business at the box office when it was released in May. Six reasons, to be exact. The film starred another South African Oscar victor, Charlize Theron, who won Best Actress for Monster 12 years ago.

Fury Road sound editor David White and sound mixer Ben Osmo have joined the avalanche of Oscars, with the film’s Academy Award tally now standing at six.

However, in a mild surprise, Open Road Films grabbed the biggest award of the evening – best picture – for the journalism drama “Spotlight”.

“Of course he was happy for everyone else and he was overjoyed for Margie [his editor and wife] but how could you not be disappointed”, he said.

“If anything, I think we are seeing a trend to honor more military movies. So the vision has primacy”.

With one of the most diverse casts of the Best Picture nominees in a year when that became a huge issue and a foolproof performance that finally delivered Leonardo DiCaprio’s Best Actor Oscar after two previous tries, “The Revenant” looked like the film to beat. Her win for Fury Road now gives hertwo Academy Awards, as she previously won for 1986’s A Room with a View. “Making “The Revenant” was about man’s relationship to the natural world, a world that we collectively felt in 2015 as the hottest year in recorded history” he said.

Gibson said he understood why Mexico’s Emmanuel Lubezki won best cinematography for The Revenant – his third consecutive Oscar after Gravity and Birdman – but did not believe Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu should have collected best director for the survival epic.

Quiz: The Oscars, how much do you know?

The awards kicked off in earnest with the first win of the night for “Spotlight” – for Best Original Screenplay – with Tom McCarthy’s chronicle of the Boston Globe’s exposé on child abuse in the Catholic church looking to repeat its success from the day before at the Spirit Awards. Instead, Mark Rylance got the award for his role in the Steven Spielberg film Bridge of Spies.

The composer John Williams (“Star Wars: The Force Awakens”) came in with his 50th nod, but lost to Ennio Morricone, who, at 87, landed his first competitive Oscar for Quentin Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight”. Lesley Vanderwalt, Elka Wardega and Damian Martin won the Oscar for Best Hair and Makeup Styling for the film.

The awards were for Editing, Make-up, Production Design, Sound Editing, Sound Mixing and Costume Design. Disney-Pixar’s “Inside Out” bagged the Best Animated Feature film trophy while the Best Foreign Language Film went to “Son of Saul”, a Hungarian film.

Following an introduction from Vice President Joe Biden, Lady Gaga took the stage to perform the Oscar-nominated song “Til It Happens to You” from the documentary The Hunting Ground, which chronicles incidences of sexual assault on college campuses. The woman wears whatever the hell she wants to Hollywood’s night of nights.

The big prizes of the night – Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Original and Best Screenplay, Adapted – were split among pictures.