LOS ANGELES (AP) – Perhaps atoning for past sins, Hollywood named the brutal, unshrinking historical drama 12 Years a Slave best picture at the 86th annual Academy Awards.
Steve McQueen’s slavery odyssey, based on Solomon Northup’s 1853 memoir, has been hailed as a landmark corrective to the movie industry’s long omission of slavery stories, following years of whiter tales like 1940 best-picture winner Gone With the Wind.
The British director dedicated the honour to those past sufferers of slavery and “the 21 million who still endure slavery today”.
“Everyone deserves not just to survive, but to live,” said McQueen, who promptly bounced into the arms of his cast. “This is the most important legacy of Solomon Northup.”
A year after celebrating Ben Affleck’s Argo over Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences opted this time for stark realism over more plainly entertaining candidates like the 3-D space marvel Gravity and the starry 1970s caper American Hustle.
Those two films came in as the leading nominee getters. David O. Russell’s American Hustle went home empty-handed, but Gravity triumphed as the night’s top award-winner. Cleaning up in technical categories like cinematography and visual effects, it earned seven Oscars including best director for Alfonso Cuaron. The Mexican filmmaker is the category’s first Latino winner.
“It was a transformative experience,” said Cuaron, who spent some five years making the film and developing its visual effects. “For a lot of people, that transformation was wisdom. For me, it was the colour of my hair.”
To his star Sandra Bullock, the sole person on screen for much of the lost-in-space drama, he said: “Sandra, you are Gravity.”