The Official Oscar Review 2008

The Oscars in 2008 was held at the Kodak Theater in Hollywood and was hosted by Jon Stewart who last did the honors in 2006. Amazingly, even though this ceremony celebrated 80 years of the Academy, it received the lowest television ratings to date making it the least watched Oscar telecast ever.

The two films that dominated the evening were ‘No Country For Old Men’ and ‘There Will Be Blood’ which each received eight nominations. It was ‘No Country For Old Men’, though, that won four Oscars out of its eight nominations. It won Best Film, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor and Best Adapted Screenplay while ‘There Will Be Blood’ came away with just Best actor and Best Cinematography. Interestingly, ‘The Bourne Ultimatum’ was nominated three times and won all three – Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing and Best Film Editing.

The 2008 Oscars were the first time since 1964 that all four of the acting awards were given to non-American actors. British performers won Best Actor (Daniel Day-Lewis for ‘There Will Be Blood’) and Best Supporting Actress (Tilda Swinton for ‘Michael Clayton’) while the French Actress Marion Cotillard won Best Actress for ‘La Vie en rose’ and the Spaniard Javier Bardem took home Best Supporting Actor for his role in ‘No Country For Old Men’.

It is interesting to note that this year continued the trend of the previous four years where the nominations for all the major awards did not contain a major blockbuster from the U.S. None of the Best Film nominees even reached the top 30 among that year’s releases and it was pointed out by many newspapers that numerous nominated films focused on dark subject matter such as violence, corruption and greed.