PwC accountants 'banned' from Oscars after best picture fiasco

last updated 2 March 2017

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Two accountants responsible for mixing up the winners' envelopes at the Academy Awards on Sunday have been banned from working at the Oscars again.

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January also saw the release of a new challenger: space-race drama Hidden Figures. The film, which stars Taraji P Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monae as the real-life mathematicians who played a major role in getting the Apollo missions off the ground, comfortably beat La La Land to the number one US box office spot when it came out. "Although it looks like a movie machine-tooled to ride the wave of #OscarsSoWhite backlash, its actual ambitions seem far more modest: to entertain a lot, to educate a bit and to cheerlead pretty much constantly," says The Guardian.

Another top contender is Barry Jenkins, who directed Moonlight, which chronicles the life of a young black man growing up in a rough neighbourhood of Miami. "In the wake of another #OscarsSoWhite controversy, the film also holds an intriguing place in the awards season," says Variety. "But it's interesting, because as much as Moonlight is a vital part and extension of the Black Lives Matter movement, its universal themes of coming to terms with identity and where you fit in the world ripple even further."

Denzel Washington and Casey Affleck are battling it out for the leading-man prize. Washington's performance in Fences – an adaptation of August Wilson's Tony-winning play that tells the story of a failed baseball player who faces discrimination as a rubbish collector – has won him the support of a number of critics. It would be his third acting Oscar, a feat only previously achieved by six others.

Viola Davis missed out on the Best Supporting Actress award in 2008 (for Doubt) and Best Actress in 2011 (for The Help) to Vicky Cristina Barcelona's Penelope Cruz and The Iron Lady's Meryl Streep. But she is back in the running for her role in Fences opposite Denzel Washington. She plays his compassionate wife, Rose. When it comes to Davis's performance, "the Academy can probably go ahead and engrave the statue", says Kristopher Tapley at Variety.

Other actresses have given "exceptional performances" in 2016, he adds, including Michelle Williams in Manchester by the Sea. She plays Randi, whose estranged husband returns to their home town with his nephew following the sudden death of his younger brother. Naomie Harris is also praised for her role as a controlling and emotionally abusive mother in Moonlight, as is Nicole Kidman for her turn in Lion. Kidman plays the adopted mother of a man who searches for his biological family using Google Earth. All three will "rightly be in the thick of the conversation" about this category, says Tapley, but with Davis in Fences the "race just ended".

But it was the underdog, Kubo and the Two Strings, that picked up the Bafta for best animated film. The fantasy adventure, starring the voices of Charlize Theron, Art Parkinson and Ralph Fiennes, revolves around Kubo, a boy with magical powers whose left eye was stolen. While a Bafta win does not guarantee an Oscar, it's worth noting that nine out of the past ten best animation winners in London have gone on to win in Hollywood.

As an Iranian, he was among the nationals from seven Muslim countries that US President Donald Trump attempted to ban from the US. Although the ban has been blocked, Farhadi declined his Oscars invitation, telling the New York Times: "For years on both sides of the ocean, groups of hardliners have tried to present to their people unrealistic and fearful images of various nations and cultures in order to turn their differences into disagreements, their disagreements into enmities and their enmities into fears. Instilling fear in the people is an important tool used to justify extremist and fanatic behaviour by narrow-minded individuals."

There were lot of war films in contention this year, as well as "tons" of fantasies, says Awards Circuit. To make matters even harder in the prediction stakes, adds the site, "anything can bite" as this is one of those categories in which "reviews kind of don't matter". Last year's winner - Jenny Beavan for Mad Max: Fury Road - was the clear and outright favourite, but the frontrunner is less certain this time around. Colleen Atwood has been tipped for Harry Potter spin-off Fantastic Beasts, which featured several noteworthy designs and interesting concepts. Joanna Johnston is also a name to watch - her work on the Brad Pitt film Allied saw widespread praise for its accurate representation of early 1940s North Africa and Britain.

Eva von Bahr and Love Larson were also nominated last year for The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared, but lost out to Mad Max: Fury Road. For A Man Called Ove, the pair had to transform actor Rolf Lassgard into the title character, a 59-year-old curmudgeonly widower. Despite being a similar age, Lassgard's full head of hair made him look younger and it was a "constant" effort to create a prosthetic to make him appear bald and then match it to his natural skin colour for every scene, said the MUAs.

Best Original Screenplay is the only Oscar for which The Lobster and 20th Century Women have been nominated, despite both receiving positive reviews from critics. The Lobster, written by Yorgos Lanthimos and Efthimis Filippou, is an absurdist dystopian black comedy that sees singletons given 45 days to find a lover before they are turned into an animal. Guy Lodge, film writer for The Observer, thinks Colin Farrell's "heartbreaking, trickily tragicomic mourning act" deserves an Oscar. "Thrilling as it was to see The Lobster snag a screenplay nod, it's a shame voters' long memories didn't extend to its leading man," he says.

Meanwhile, Annette Bening was widely predicted to receive a nomination for her role in 20th Century Women, in which she plays a mother searching for role models for her teenage son in 1979. She didn't make the shortlist, but writer Mike Mills did. "Of course, the only reason you get nominated for a script is because all your actors did a great job at making it seem real and alive," Mills told Vulture.