Eight Oscar speeches that will make you cringe

All the night’s highlights

The “Dallas Buyers Club” actor explains how he dropped 47 pounds to play a man with AIDS

The Dallas Buyers Club star on playing a transsexual called Rayon opposite Matthew McConaughey Jared Leto lost over 30 pounds to play Rayon, a transsexual drug addict with HIV in Dallas Buyers Club. Funny and sad, his performance will touch your heart and has earned him an Oscar nomination. It’s not the first time the onetime My So-Called Life star has pushed his body to the limits. The 42-year-old dropped 24 pounds for Requiem for a Dream and grew to nearly 16 stone to play John Lennon’s killer in Chapter 27.Despite being scarily skeletal as Rayon, Leto makes a surprisingly pretty woman. Does he agree? "No! I don’t think if I was walking down the street anyone would be going 'Look at that hot chick.'" But the actor, who is also frontman of the band 30 Seconds to Mars, clearly prepared well for the role. So how did he do it? Follow us                    He flirted with the director "It wasn’t an audition. But I had a meeting with the director over Skype. I said hello and reached over, grabbed lipstick and put it on. His jaw dropped. I unbuttoned my jacket, and underneath I had on a little pink fuzzy sweater. I proceeded to flirt with him for 20 minutes." Most popular in Film The Monuments Men What price art? Multihyphenate George Clooney’s true-life WWII adventure—a frustrating tonal mishmash—puts the question up front, as curator and conservationist Frank Stokes (Clooney) lays it all out for President Roosevelt: Hitler and his cronies have stolen tons of t

Movies, actors, directors, soundtracks: one list to rule them all. Follow us                    Most popular in Film The LEGO Movie With one obvious exception, toy stories don’t have the luckiest big-screen pedigree: The results are often either sugary cartoons for undemanding kids or noisy blockbusters for brain-dead teens. If the producers of The LEGO Movie had taken either approach, there would have been an outcry. These lifeless plastic bricks are too beloved, too iconic to be subjected to the Hollywood sausage-factory treatment. Luckily for all, someone had the foresight to bring in Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs writer-directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, and the result is bold, berserk and strangely beautiful, exuding LEGO love from each frame. Our everyman hero, Emmet (Chris Pratt), is the happiest guy in Bricksville: He’s gainfully employed as a construction worker (what else?), he adores his coworkers, and he knows that mighty President Business (Will Ferrell) has his best interests at heart. So when he’s thrown into an epic conflict between Business’s robot clones and the forces of creativity and invention (led, of course, by Batman and Abraham Lincoln), all Emmet wants is to get back to normality. Occasional pacing issues aside, The LEGO Movie is sheer joy: The script is witty, the satire surprisingly pointed, and the animation tactile and imaginative. Expect controversy over the climax, though. The film plunges deep into waters left uncharted sin

Tom Huddleston lists the least deserving Academy Award winners. It’s Oscar season once again—and while Academy members scratch their heads trying to decide which of this year’s crop of worthy titles deserves to take home the big prize, we trawl the archives to uncover the worst Oscar offenses of all time. From the film that beat Citizen Kane for Best Picture to the time Harry and the Hendersons walked away with a handful of gold, here are all the Academy’s biggest blunders in one handy list.This is by no means a definitive rundown of all of Oscar’s shoddy decisions—we didn’t even have room to mention Celine Dion or Chicago—so if you really, really hate Titanic or really, really love Forrest Gump, tell us about it in the comments box below. Follow us                    You might also like Most popular in Film Andrew Rafacz Gallery Established in 2004 as Bucket Rider Gallery, Andrew Rafacz features emerging and mid-career artists working in video, painting, photography, sculpture and other media. The roster includes photographers Jason Lazarus and John Opera, painter Wendy White, prolific designer Cody Hudson and more. Gallery 400 Founded in 1983, Gallery 400 has established itself as a venue for cutting-edge contemporary art, architecture and design. Featuring local, national and international artists, the university gallery combines intellectual exhibitions with an approachable atmosphere, offering a diverse program of lectures and events for students, professional arti

And the nominees are… Wait, him?

On the day 12 Years a Slave received nine Oscar nominations, we picked up the phone to the Hunger and Shame director to find out if he cares about awards The 1840s-set real-life historical drama 12 Years a Slave stars Chiwetel Ejiofor as Solomon Northup, an African-American man kidnapped and sold into slavery in the South. It’s 44-year-old British director Steve McQueen’s third feature film after Hunger and Shame, and it's his first feature to receive any Oscar nominations. McQueen's film is currently poised to win big at the Academy Awards on March 2, and so a few hours after hearing of the nominations we tracked him down in Los Angeles, where he was staying following the Golden Globe awards earlier this week. Follow us                    Congratulations on your film’s nine Oscar nominations. You must be over the moon.I’m so happy. Really humbled. It’s such a honour. And I’m so happy for the cast and their nominations. Where were you when you found out?In bed sleeping, in Los Angeles. But I thought: this might never happen again, so I got up and put the TV on. Then the phone started ringing. Do the Oscars matter?Yes they matter! Because people see the film. We didn’t have a lot of money for advertising, so it means people will look at the nominations and go and see the movie. I can’t tell you how helpful it is. People said 12 Years a Slave would be too brutal for audiences. But you’re number one at the box office in the UK.In London people have been queuing

On the day American Hustle received ten Oscar nominations, we phoned director David O. Russell to find out how he felt. The 1970s-set crime comedy American Hustle is 55-year-old director David O. Russell’s seventh feature and stars Amy Adams, Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence as four larger-than-life characters caught up in a hugely entertaining East Coast con-artist yarn that’s heavy on wisecracks, costumes and music.Oscar voters clearly adore both Russell and the film: for the second year in a row, a film by the director of I Heart Huckabees and The Fighter is nominated in the Best Picture, Best Director and all four acting categories (the same happened with Silver Linings Playbook in 2013). A handful of other nominations means the film will share joint honors with Gravity as the most nominated picture at the Academy Awards on March 2. We called Russell at home in Los Angeles on the day he heard the news about the Oscar nominations. Follow us                    Congratulations on your film’s ten Oscar nominations. You must be happy?Well, I’m ecstatic and very happy for my actors and all my people. [Pause] Sorry, excuse me, I have a three-year-old here swinging a big ten-foot stick knocking shit over. [Laughs] Maybe he shouldn’t have that stick? Sorry.Were you up at dawn to hear the nominations?Yes I was. You never know, anything can happen. An-y-thing can happen! I wrote to everybody the night before and said thank you.You emailed your cast?Yeah, a