Oscar 2016 : Mad Max Fury Road wins six Oscars

Mad Max Won All the Oscars, Except the Ones It Really Deserved

There was a brief moment during the Oscars where it looked like Mad Max: Fury Road might be on the way to getting the recognition it deserved as a truly groundbreaking, visually stunning film. Spoiler alert: It didn’t.

As is so often the case for genre works, Mad Max: Fury Road won a boatload of behind-the-scenes awards—six of the seven (edited: this initially said five, it was a mistake) it was nominated for—but lost Best Director and Best Picture. Here are the Mad Max winners, which are richly deserved:

Film Editing: Margaret Sixel
Costume Design: Jenny Beavan
Makeup: Lesley Vanderwalt, Elka Wardega and Damian Martin
Sound Editing: Mark Mangini and David White
Sound Mixing: Chris Jenkins, Gregg Rudloff and Ben Osmo
Production design: Production design by Colin Gibson; set decoration by Lisa Thompson
 
All of these people did a truly amazing job making a goddamn miracle of a film. I am so glad they were recognized. And I’m also thrilled that no other movie won more awards than this one. But here’s the thing: With Mad Max being acknowledged as the year’s best in so many categories, why didn’t George Miller and the film as a whole deserve to win?

Reasonable minds can differ about the relative quality of the Best Picture nominees. There were a lot of great movies in the past year. But Mad Max: Fury Road was a masterpiece. It is a credit to the entire medium on every. Single. Level. The Oscars should have rewarded it, and George Miller, for doing absolutely everything right. Not most things. Everything.

Fury Road is a gorgeous movie—with a bunch of important underlying messages about autonomy, sexism, climate change, greed... Fury Road has everything, executed with a grace that is frankly astonishing. This movie makes impossible things look damn easy. Even its own backstory—the years Miller and co. spent laboring to get it done, in the face of mind-blowing setbacks—exhibit the best kind of filmmaking passion. There is not a single thing that the other nominees did, that Mad Max didn’t also do. Usually better.

Being angry at the Oscars is a pointless endeavor, since it’s an essentially pointless show. At the end of the day, Miller, and everyone who worked on the film, got to actually make their dream project. And people saw it, and loved it. But, goddamn, would it have been great for the people who make films to step up and acknowledge its brilliance. To encourage more filmmakers to reach as far as they did, and to achieve what might seem impossible. 

Mad Max: Fury Road wins most awards of the night with six Oscars

The biggest win of the evening may have gone to Spotlight, but it was another film entirely that really won this year's Oscars. Mad Max: Fury Road took home six awards over the course of the night, far surpassing any other film (its closest competitor was The Revenant, which earned just three). George Miller's post-apocalyptic action film nearly swept all the below-the-line categories, including Best Costume Design, Production Design, Makeup & Hairstyling, Film Editing, and both Sound Mixing and Editing. The only exceptions were Best Cinematography, which The Revenant's Emmanuel Lubezki took home for a record third year in a row, and Visual Effects, which Ex Machina won in what was one of the biggest upsets of the night. Along the way, Fury Road also helped shut out Star Wars: The Force Awakens from receiving any of the Oscars it was nominated for.

Fury Road electrified critics when it came out earlier this year, with Miller's creative vision incorporating bold cinematography, electrifying chase sequences, and one of the most compelling action heroes in years in the form of Charlize Theron's Imperator Furiosa. It received numerous accolades from critic's associations and 10 Oscar nominations, second only to The Revenant's 12, but despite that it seemed to lose steam towards the end of the season, as attention turned towards the Best Picture battle between Revenant, Spotlight, and The Big Short. Some felt it was due to the film being released so early in the year — often death for films with Oscar aspirations — but clearly Miller's fantastical world made a lasting impression on Academy voters.

Miller's film broke through during a splintered awards season
One could argue that it doesn't make a ton of logical sense for a film to dominate the way Fury Road did and not walk away with awards for directing or Best Picture. Of course, there's a lot that often doesn't make sense about the Oscars. What remains is the fact that George Miller's tour de force was able to break through during a splintered awards season in which no single film was ever truly in the driver's seat. Even better, such a high-profile show of support — so overwhelming that Louis C.K. even joked that Fury Road had won a documentary award — could potentially make Warner Bros. even more interested in taking another trip to the dystopian wastelands of Miller's imagination. I'm just hoping that, no matter what the filmmaker has said in the past, Furiosa is along for the ride.