Sex, Drugs, and Oscar: The Mother Jones 2014 Academy Awards Live Blog

Featuring Samuel L. Jackson, Ellen DeGeneres, and P!nk.

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Good news, everyone! You’ve arrived at the Mother Jones Oscars Live Blog, 2014. We’ll start around 8:30 p.m. EST tonight when the 86th Academy Awards ceremony gets underway on ABC, so sit tight. (We will not be blogging the red carpet broadcast, which starts at 7 p.m.)

First off, here are some lists you might find useful:

We’ll be updating this throughout the night here:

12:00: 12 Years a Slave wins Best Picture. In his acceptance speech, director Steve McQueen dedicated the award to everyone who had endured slavery and to the tens of millions of people still in slavery today.

 

11:56: Matthew McConaughey wins Best Actor for Dallas Buyers Club. He also delivered a solid performance in Best Picture nominee The Wolf of Wall Street in 2013:

 

11:48: Cate Blanchett wins Best Actress for this Woody Allen movie:

 

11:38: Alfonso Cuarón wins Best Director for Gravity. Here’s a “reporter” asking the director last year if it was hard filming the movie in space:

 

11:30: 12 Years a Slave wins Best Adapted Screenplay, and Her wins Best Original Screenplay. Here’s when I asked Her writer/director Spike Jonze him if making the film made him want to marry or have sex with to his iPhone.   —AS

 

11:18: Gravity wins Best Original Score, Frozen wins Best Original Song. Yay!

 

11:12: Idina Menzel performs “Let It Go” from Frozen:

Image via @BuzzFeedCeleb.

 

11:01: The Oscars did their annual tribute to the people Hollywood and the film industry lost since the last Oscars ceremony. This includes Paul Walker, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Shirley Temple Black, and Peter O’Toole.

 

10:42: Well, that was fast. @TheEllenShow beat @BarackObama for the record for most retweets. History made, America. Everyone remember where you were when it happened.

 

10:38: P!nk performed “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” She wasn’t bad. But here’s a better version of the classic:

 

10:33: Gravity wins for both cinematography and film editing. Seems about right:

 

10:31: Ellen gave out pizza tonight:

 

10:29: While presenting on-stage with Amy Adams, Bill Murray gave a shout-out to the late Harold Ramis. Here’s Ramis’ great advice to young filmmakers (or anybody, really).

 

10:17: Lupita Nyong’o wins Best Supporting Actress for 12 Years a Slave. The Academy got this one right. Check out her interview on Jimmy Kimmel:

 

10:06: Ellen went into the audience and got some famous people together to take this selfie:

Oscar selfie

Image via Chris Geidner.

She said she wanted this to break the record for most retweets, a record currently held by @BarackObama.

There was another important group selfie this weekend—this “Presidential Selfie.”

 

9:56: U2 performs “Ordinary Love,” their song for Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom. Here’s the song:

 

9:50: The Great Beauty wins Best Foreign Language Film. Here’s a trailer:

 

9:46: Kevin Spacey did his House of Cards voice on-stage.

Kevin Spacey

Image via @smoda.

 

9:41: 20 Feet From Stardom wins Best Documentary Feature. If you ask me, The Act of Killing was completely robbed—it made the kind of human-rights impact that most documentarians can only dream of. —AS

 

9:28: Karen O performs her nominated tune “The Moon Song,” from Best Picture nominee Her:

 

9:23: Gravity wins Best Visual Effects. Tim Webber, Chris Lawrence, David Shirk, and Neil Corbould get the prize.

 

9:16: Frozen wins Best Animated Feature. Here’s a popular song from the film:

 

9:01: Ellen took a selfie during her Oscars hosting gig, by the way:

 

8:57: Pharrell Williams performed his Oscar-nominated song “Happy” (from Despicable Me 2). Here he is dancing with Meryl Streep during the performance:

 
 

Image via Cine Premiere. —AS

 

8:46: Jared Leto wins Best Supporting Actor for Dallas Buyers Club. During his acceptance speech, he gave a shout-out to the people of Venezuela and Ukraine (Venezuelan protesters indeed asked Oscar winners to speak up and raise awareness during the awards ceremony broadcast). —AS

Jared Leto

 

8:38: Host Ellen DeGeneres makes jokes about, but not limited to, Jonah Hill’s penis:

Ellen DeGeneres

It was a less musical intro than last year’s. —AS

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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