‘Argo’ wins Best Picture

By Tom Morrison

It was a night of rarities at the 85^th Annual Academy Awards.

Best Picture winner Argo became the fourth recipient of the award that wasn’t nominated in the Best Director category. The last time this happened was in 1990 with Driving Miss Daisy. Argo also won for Best Achievement in Editing and Best Adapted Screenplay.

It was also the first time two nominees tied in 18 years. Zero Dark Thirty and Skyfall both took home the Best Sound Editing Oscar. This is the sixth time in Oscar history this has occurred, with the most famous example being Katharine Hepburn and Barbra Streisand winning Best Actress in 1968.

Jennifer Lawrence was this year’s Best Actress for her work in Silver Linings Playbook, while Anne Hathaway picked up the Best Supporting Actress award for Les Miserables. Each had one prior acting nomination.

Upon winning for Lincoln, Daniel Day-Lewis became the first person to earn three Best Actor statues. He is now one award shy of tying Katharine Hepburn’s record of four leading performance Oscars. Other actors, such as presenters Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson, have won three acting awards but each has one in the supporting category.

Christoph Waltz earned his second Best Supporting Actor award for Django Unchained. He previously won in 2010 for Inglourious Basterds, another Quentin Tarantino film. Tarantino himself won his second award for Best Original Screenplay, his first being for Pulp Fiction in 1995.

Another two-timer was Ang Lee, who picked up the Best Director Oscar for Life of Pi. Both of his wins were not enough to win Best Picture. Just as Life of Pi lost to Argo, Brokeback Mountain lost to Crash in 2006.

Despite the loss, Life of Pi was the most-awarded film of the night, beating Argo’s three wins by one.