5 Times History Was Made at the Oscars

The Oscars may be a thing of the past (a week is like a year in Hollywood time, right?) but we at HCK never tire of talking about the Academy Awards and would love to jog your memory about all the amazing things that happened at this year’s show. Here are 5 historical moments from the 86th Academy Awards, which aired last Sunday night: 

1. Alfonso Cuarón, a Mexican filmmaker, is the first ever Latino to win the award for “Best Director.” He actually went home with two Oscars because he was shared the “Best Film Editing” Award with his co-editor Mark Sanger. Although won both awards for his work on Gravity, he has directed other box-office hits in the past, including Children of Men, Harry Potter and the Prison of Azkaban, and A Little Princess. 

2. Steve McQueen is the first ever Black director to have a film, 12 Years a Slave, win the Oscar for “Best Picture.”Although the British filmmaker did not take home the award for “Best Director,” his film won the most coveted award of the evening forever marking its place in cinematic history. He also dedicated his win as producer to the millions who have endured and who are still enduring slavery, before he understandably started jumping for joy.

3. Jared Leto is the first male actor to win an Oscar for the portrayal of a transgender woman. He won the “Best Supporting Actor” award for his portrayal of Rayon, a trans woman afflicted with AIDs, in Dallas Buyers Club. The only other actor to ever break similar history was Hilary Swank for her portrayal of a trans man in Boys Don’t Cry, which earned her the Oscar for “Best Actress.” During his acceptance speech, Leto touchingly thanked his single-mother for everything she ever did for him and  he reached out to those “dreamers” struggling in Venezuela and Ukraine (the part of his speech that was censored in Russia.) He then dedicated his win to “the thirty-six million people who have lost the battle to AIDS, and to those of you out there who have ever felt injustice because of who you are, or who you love.” After the big win, many have come out in opposition to the casting of and congratulations to Leto, believing that the role should have gone to a trans woman and that Leto is actually “trans-ignorant.”

4. The Host, Ellen DeGeneres, tweeted a selfie from the audience that quickly became the most retweeted tweet ever. Ellen first asked Meryl Streep to take a picture with her in order to try and beat the Twitter record and ended up grabbing as many A-List celebrities as she could find (which wasn’t hard at all) to join them. Not only has the selfie been retweeted more than three million times, beating Obama’s “Four More Years” tweet by more than a million, but it temporarily crashed Twitter during the ceremony. 

5. Since Ellen DeGeneres also hosted the 79th Academy Awards, The Oscars has now been hosted twice by an openly gay or lesbian person, although it was the same person both times.

Here’s hoping for another groundbreaking Oscars next year, or better yet, for a year when feats tied to sexual orientation or race are so commonplace that they don’t come as a surprise.

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