Sex, Drugs, and Oscar: The Mother Jones 2014 Academy Awards Live Blog

Featuring Samuel L. Jackson, Ellen DeGeneres, and P!nk.

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Good news, everyone! You’ve arrived at the Mother Jones Oscars Live Blog, 2014. We’ll start around 8:30 p.m. EST tonight when the 86th Academy Awards ceremony gets underway on ABC, so sit tight. (We will not be blogging the red carpet broadcast, which starts at 7 p.m.)

First off, here are some lists you might find useful:

We’ll be updating this throughout the night here:

12:00: 12 Years a Slave wins Best Picture. In his acceptance speech, director Steve McQueen dedicated the award to everyone who had endured slavery and to the tens of millions of people still in slavery today.

 

11:56: Matthew McConaughey wins Best Actor for Dallas Buyers Club. He also delivered a solid performance in Best Picture nominee The Wolf of Wall Street in 2013:

 

11:48: Cate Blanchett wins Best Actress for this Woody Allen movie:

 

11:38: Alfonso Cuarón wins Best Director for Gravity. Here’s a “reporter” asking the director last year if it was hard filming the movie in space:

 

11:30: 12 Years a Slave wins Best Adapted Screenplay, and Her wins Best Original Screenplay. Here’s when I asked Her writer/director Spike Jonze him if making the film made him want to marry or have sex with to his iPhone.   —AS

 

11:18: Gravity wins Best Original Score, Frozen wins Best Original Song. Yay!

 

11:12: Idina Menzel performs “Let It Go” from Frozen:

Image via @BuzzFeedCeleb.

 

11:01: The Oscars did their annual tribute to the people Hollywood and the film industry lost since the last Oscars ceremony. This includes Paul Walker, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Shirley Temple Black, and Peter O’Toole.

 

10:42: Well, that was fast. @TheEllenShow beat @BarackObama for the record for most retweets. History made, America. Everyone remember where you were when it happened.

 

10:38: P!nk performed “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” She wasn’t bad. But here’s a better version of the classic:

 

10:33: Gravity wins for both cinematography and film editing. Seems about right:

 

10:31: Ellen gave out pizza tonight:

 

10:29: While presenting on-stage with Amy Adams, Bill Murray gave a shout-out to the late Harold Ramis. Here’s Ramis’ great advice to young filmmakers (or anybody, really).

 

10:17: Lupita Nyong’o wins Best Supporting Actress for 12 Years a Slave. The Academy got this one right. Check out her interview on Jimmy Kimmel:

 

10:06: Ellen went into the audience and got some famous people together to take this selfie:

Oscar selfie

Image via Chris Geidner.

She said she wanted this to break the record for most retweets, a record currently held by @BarackObama.

There was another important group selfie this weekend—this “Presidential Selfie.”

 

9:56: U2 performs “Ordinary Love,” their song for Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom. Here’s the song:

 

9:50: The Great Beauty wins Best Foreign Language Film. Here’s a trailer:

 

9:46: Kevin Spacey did his House of Cards voice on-stage.

Kevin Spacey

Image via @smoda.

 

9:41: 20 Feet From Stardom wins Best Documentary Feature. If you ask me, The Act of Killing was completely robbed—it made the kind of human-rights impact that most documentarians can only dream of. —AS

 

9:28: Karen O performs her nominated tune “The Moon Song,” from Best Picture nominee Her:

 

9:23: Gravity wins Best Visual Effects. Tim Webber, Chris Lawrence, David Shirk, and Neil Corbould get the prize.

 

9:16: Frozen wins Best Animated Feature. Here’s a popular song from the film:

 

9:01: Ellen took a selfie during her Oscars hosting gig, by the way:

 

8:57: Pharrell Williams performed his Oscar-nominated song “Happy” (from Despicable Me 2). Here he is dancing with Meryl Streep during the performance:

 
 

Image via Cine Premiere. —AS

 

8:46: Jared Leto wins Best Supporting Actor for Dallas Buyers Club. During his acceptance speech, he gave a shout-out to the people of Venezuela and Ukraine (Venezuelan protesters indeed asked Oscar winners to speak up and raise awareness during the awards ceremony broadcast). —AS

Jared Leto

 

8:38: Host Ellen DeGeneres makes jokes about, but not limited to, Jonah Hill’s penis:

Ellen DeGeneres

It was a less musical intro than last year’s. —AS

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AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

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