5:07pm: Rock says he didn't bail on the Oscars hosting job "because the last thing I need is to lose another job to Kevin Hart." Hart is prolific, he says, not even porno stars turn out pictures as fast as he does.

4:42pm:Other notable winners include:

• Brie Larson as best actress for Room;
• Ennio Morricone's best score (remarkably, his first win) for The Hateful Eight; 
• Amy for best documentary; 
• Inside Out as best animated feature; 
• Alicia Vikander as best supporting actress (for The Danish Girl); 
• and Mark Rylance as best supporting actor (Bridge of Spies)

And chief among those that missed out:

• Our Lady of the Cate (Blanchett, that is) did not pick up a third acting Oscar for her lead in Carol (more disappointingly, Rooney Mara also was overlooked in the best supporting actress category);
• The Big Short won for adapted screenplay but lost out in four other categories;
• Mark Rylance's best supporting actor was the only win among six nominations for Bridge of Spies;
• Alicia Vikander's best supporting actress was the only win from four nominations for The Danish Girl;
• Brooklyn was none from three (despite the clear love in the room for best actress nominee Saoirse Ronan)

And it was a total shut-out for:

• The Martian (no wins from seven nominations)
• Carol (none from six)
• Star Wars: The Force Awakens (none from five)

 

 

 

4:42pm: So, it's all over bar the partying - and man, will they be partying tonight. So, before we all retire to the Vanity Fair shindig (what, you didn't get an invitation?) let's take a look at the big winners and losers from the 88th Academy Awards.

Leading the pack in purely numerical terms is Mad Max: Fury Road. It missed out on best director for George Miller and best picture (as a sci-fi action film, winning either or both of those was always going to be a long shot), but it collected six awards, and eight Australians will be clutching a nice chunk of gold statuary as they shuffle from party to party this evening (with one of those in hand, you never need to say "my name is on the door"). 

To recap, in what is Australia's most successful outing at the Oscars, Mad Max: Fury Road won the following:

• Costume design Jenny Beavan (UK)
• Production design Colin Gibson (Australian); Set Decoration: Lisa Thompson (Australian)
• Make-up and hairstyling Lesley Vanderwalt, Elka Wardega and Damian Martin (all Australian)
• Editing Margaret Sixel (South African/Australian)
• Sound Editing Mark Mangini (US) and David White (Australian)
• Sound mixing Chris Jenkins (US), Gregg Rudloff (US) And Ben Osmo (Australian)

That's six from 10 nominations, which was the best performance from any film on the night.

Next up was The Revenant, which brought Alejandro G. Inarritu his second consecutive best director Oscar, won Leo DiCaprio his long-anticipated (-demanded, -begged-for) best actor Oscar, and best cinematography for Emmanuel Lubezki (his third on the trot, following wins for Gravity and Birdman). So that's three from 12 nominations – call that glass half-full or half empty, as you wish, but I don't think Leo's going to need to beg for a top-up this evening. 

Spotlight had two wins from its six nominations, but they were in key categories – original screenplay and the big one, best picture.

4:13pm:  

 

 

 

 

 

4:07pm: And one last parting shot from what will surely go down in history, despite the absence of nominees in the acting categories, as the blackest Oscars in memory (well, at least since Denzel Washington and Halle Berry did the one-two in 2002). As the end credits roll, Public Enemy's 1990 track Fight The Power plays on the soundtrack. Nice touch. 

 

 

 

 

4:03pm: There's no doubt Spotlight was the worthiest film among the nominees, and as a journalist it was a delight to watch such a rousing call to arms for a profession that it's all too easy to feel gloomy about. But was it the best film among this bunch? Certainly not if you're judging on the basis of craft, innovation, freshness of storytelling technique. But if it's about a really strong story well told - and, more than that, a strong story about something real, something that matters - then yes. 

Oh, George Pell, I hope you're watching. 

4:00pm: Oscar finally in hand, Leo the actor steps aside on the dais for Leo the environmental activist. "Making The Revenant was about man's relationship to the natural world ... climate change is real, it's happening right now, it is the most urgent threat facing our entire species. We need to stop procrastinating, we need to support people who speak for all of humanity, for the indigenous peoples, for our children's children ... let us not take this planet for granted. I do not take tonight for granted."

 

 

3:57pm: Oh, it's been a long time coming but he deserves it. 

Seriously, I doubt we will ever see a better display of shouting, grunting and crawling in the movies than the one Leo gives in The Revenant, and I'm even more certain that if we do it won't have a bear-humping scene in it. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3:53pm: No scroll, but Brie Larson managed to thank everyone in the northern hemisphere anyway. She looks gorgeous in some sort of strappy royal blue feathery floor-length gown, she beams, she gives a big "I love you" to real-life partner Alex Greenwald, a musician who used to play in Phantom Planet with actor-writer-producer Jason Schwartzman. Oh, and she thanks her screen partner, young Jacob Tremblay, too. 

 

 

 

 

3:46pm: The best actress category is so strong this year, but I reckon it's hard to imagine anyone but Brie Larson winning for Room. Judging by that little yelp, though, there's a lot of love in the room for Saoirse Ronan in Brooklyn. Charlotte Rampling is awesome in 45 Years, too. Still, mine is on Larson. 

3:44pm: Best director for Alejandro Inarritu, who won best director and picture last year for Birdman. That makes him the first director to win back-to-back Oscars since Joseph Mankiewicz for A Letter to Three Wives in 1950 and All About Eve in 1951. It's a feat that has been accomplished only one other time, by John Ford with The Grapes of Wrath in 1941 and How Green Was My Valley in 1942. So, exalted company. And if he also goes back-to-back on best picture he'll be out on his own.

Alejandro uses his speech to push the diversity issue along a little further, using his acceptance speech to say that he hopes we will soon "make the colour of your skin become as irrelevant as the colour of your hair". 

 

 

3:31pm: Sam Smith and Jimmy Napes win, and Sam dedicates it to the LBGTI community. He's followed by Sacha Baron Cohen as Ali G, who makes his own call for diversity, asking why there isn't more acknowledgement of "all them little yellow people with tiny dongs ... you know, Minions". 

By the way, Sam Smith claiming he was the first openly gay man to win an Oscar isn't right. Australian Adam Elliot thanked his boyfriend when he won for best animated short (for Harvie Krumpet) in 2004. 

3:25pm: Hooray for Ennio! It's his first win from six nominations, though he does have an honorary one (which probably prompted a lot of people to assume he was dead already). 

Respect. The orchestra doesn't cut him out as he delivers his speech in Italian, with a translator by his side. Honour among conductor/composers.

3:22pm: Pharrell Williams and Quincy Jones present best score, and it's like we're seeing the elder statesman and the inheritor of the mantle. Nice. 

I loved Ennio Morricone's score for The Hateful Eight - probably the best element of the movie, really. Fingers crossed. 

3:16pm: Vice-President Joe Biden gets a standing ovation - and that's before he's even started speaking about the need for people to stand up against sexual assault. He introduces "my friend, and a courageous lady herself, Lady Gaga".

She's singing Til It Happens To You, the nominated song from the documentary The Hunting Ground, about campus rapes. Gaga - who co-wrote with Diane Warren (who has been nominated seven times before, without a win), is surrounded onstage by survivors of sexual assault. Not sure about the song, but it's a pretty powerful moment. 

 

 

 

 

 

3:11pm:Son of Saul best foreign language film? You bet it is. Go, see it. It is grim, but well worth it. A remarkable debut from 38-year-old Laszlo Nemes.   

 

 

3:09pm: Well, here's a blatant bid to expand the global appeal of the telecast: to present best foreign language film we have Lee Byung-Hun, introduced as one of South Korea's biggest movie stars, and Sofia Vergara, the Colombian bombshell from TV's Modern Family. And why not? The days of the Oscars being able to claim a worldwide audience of 1 billion are well and truly over, so they need all the help they can get. 

3:06pm: Cute. Jacob Tremblay, the young boy from Room (who really should have been among the nominees), and Abraham Attah, the young star of Beasts of No Nation, take the stage to announce the best live action short award, with the help of a couple of wooden fruit crates. Again I say, cute. 

3:03pm: Here's Dave Grohl, singing the Beatles' Blackbird for the In Memoriam segment.

Who's there: Alan Rickman, Leonard Nimoy, Albert Maysles, Christopher Lee, Wes Craven, David Bowie, Chantal Akerman, Maureen O'Hara, Lizabeth Scott (who was missing from last year's segment), Melissa Mathison.

Who's not there: Jacques Rivette, Gunnar Hansen (he played Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), Andrezj Zulawski (Polish director). No doubt more to come. 

 

 

 

 

2:56pm: Academy president Cheryl Boon Isaacs has been outspoken about the need to make the body more representative of the wider population - in other words, less old, rich and white. And she's not shirking the issue here, either. "While change is often difficult, it is necessary," she says. "I am confident that together we can shape a future of which all of us can be proud." It's a motherhood statement, to be sure, but in terms of this sort of address it counts as borderline radical. 

2:51pm: So, if you were Leonardo DiCaprio, would you be feeling confident now or would you be feeling this is going to be another one that slips just out of reach? I suppose he must be thinking himself lucky that Tom Hardy is nominated for The Revenant in the supporting actor category, not for Mad Max as best actor. The way this head-to-head is playing out, he'd probably prefer to be mauled by a bear.

While we're on the topic, I reckon Charlize Theron should feel a little unlucky not to have been nominated as best actress for Fury Road. 

 

 

 

 

2:46pm: Poor Asif Kapadia. His 2010 film Senna was Britain's highest-grossing documentary. And then along came Amy to knock it off its perch. Oh well, I guess that Oscar will have to do him as consolation. 

2:42pm: Louis CK is presenting the award for best documentary short. "This Oscar is going home in a Honda Civic," he says. "This will be the nicest thing the winner will own in their entire life."

"And the Oscar goes to .... Mad Max."

Actually, it goes to Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, whose film Girl in the River is about a young woman who survived an attempted honour killing in Pakistan. It's her second win. And for the record, I suspect she doesn't drive a Honda Civic.

 

 

2:37pm: Mark Rylance is thoroughly deserving of this win; he's probably the best thing about Bridge of Spies (though I don't mean that as a slur on Spielberg's Cold War thriller - it's actually very good). 

Theatre lovers know him from his work as artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe in London, but until now his best-known work on film was in Patrice Chereau's 2001 erotic drama Intimacy, famous for its explicit scene of fellatio. 

And in case you're wondering about that accent - sounds kind of Scottish, maybe - though he was born in the UK (in Kent), he actually grew up in Wisconsin. Hope that helps. 

2:30pm: If Tom Hardy wins best supporting actor I really hope he gives his acceptance speech in character, as mumble-mouthed trapper John Fitzgerald. Three people in Arkansas might understand him.

2:29pm:

2:29pm: Did Patricia Arquette take a valium before coming on stage? She is s-p-e-a-k-i-n-g s-o s-l-o-w-l-y. 

2:28pm: Chris Rock is stirring up trouble in Compton. How upset were you at the lack of African-American nominees? "Smack-a-white-man mad?" he asks one man, who notes you'd go to jail for such a thing. "You get three years just for a hard look," says Rock.

He's vox-popping about what white movies they most liked. Most draw a blank, except for one woman who says By The Sea (Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's slow-boil marital drama). It's the most shocking thing anyone has said all night.  

2:22pm: Here's the headline from this year's Oscars: Mad Max the big winner. 

Regardless of what happens from here, The Revenant cannot now win more awards than Mad Max: Fury Road, and nor can anything else. George Miller's film has six awards, with a stake in two more - best director and best picture - while The Revenant has just one from the eight it has so far contested, with a shot at four more (actor for Leo DiCaprio, supporting actor for Tom Hardy, plus director and picture). 

It's a remarkable show of love for Miller's road movie. 

2:14pm: To recap, here are the categories in which Mad Max: Fury Road has won, with the nationality of the winners: 

Costume design Jenny Beavan (UK)

Production design  Colin Gibson (Australian); Set Decoration: Lisa Thompson (Australian)

Make-up and hairstyling Lesley Vanderwalt, Elka Wardega and Damian Martin (all Australian)

Editing Margaret Sixel (South African/Australian)

Sound Editing Mark Mangini (US) and David White (Australian)

Sound mixing Chris Jenkins (US), Gregg Rudloff (US) And Ben Osmo (Australian)

 

 

 

 

 

 

2:02pm: Of the eight technical awards Mad Max: Fury Road was up for, it has won six. Ex Machina takes best visual effects, and I reckon that's a great choice because it created such a beguiling and entirely believable world on a relatively low budget. Not much love for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, though. Continuing a fine tradition of the Academy doing its damnedest to ignore the Star Wars films (apart from the first one, that is, which pulled six awards from 10 nominations, plus a special award for sound design. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1:55pm: Ben Osmo is the sole Australian among the three winners for sound mixing, and that takes the parochial tally to five awards and seven winners so far, an incredible result. Let's spare a moment for John Seale, though, whose cinematography was magnificent and inventive but was overshadowed in the minds of voters by Emmanuel Lubezki's work on The Revenant. In any other year, you suspect, he might well have won.

1:51pm: Win number five for Mad Max: Fury Road, the award shared by Mark Mangini, an American, and David White, who leaves exactly no-one in the room doubting his nationality with a massive shout-out to Australia. Imagine how much louder he's going to be at 3am.

1:49pm: Does anyone else detect a theme in the nominees for best sound editing? Click-smash-crack-boom. 

1:46pm: Margaret Sixel thanks her colleagues in the edit team, who "work with their hands, heads and, most importantly, their hearts". A well-deserved win for Mad Max: Fury Road, which derives so much of its insane energy from the rapid-fire editing. The only question is, does Australia get to claim South African-born Sixel - who gave a shout-out to her compadre Charlize Theron from the stage - as one of its own? Well, she's been in Australia since the 1980s and married George Miller in 1995, son hell yeah. So that's six Australian winners in four categories, which I'm pretty sure makes this the best performance by Australians ever at the Oscars. 

 

 

1:40pm: Yep, it's Lubezki, and it's hard to argue with it. Whatever you think of it (me, I love it) The Revenant is an amazing looking film. And that's three in a row for Lubezki, following his wins for Gravity in 2014 and Birdman in 2015. That is some streak for the man his friends call "Chivo" (it's Spanish for goat; go figure). 

 

 

1:40pm:Editing 

The Big Short - Hank Corwin
Mad Max: Fury Road - Margaret Sixel
The Revenant - Stephen Mirrione
Spotlight - Tom McArdle
Star Wars: The Force Awakens - Maryann Brandon and Mary Jo Markey

Winner: Mad Max: Fury Road - Margaret Sixel

1:37pm: Australian John Seale is in with a shot at cinematography, which would be four in a row for Max, but I think it's going to Emmanuel Lubezki for The Revenant. 

1:31pm: Wow. That's three on the trot for Mad Max, and all the winners in this category are Australian, so that's five Australian winners in three categories so far. Very strong start.

1:26pm: And after Tina Fey announces the "nonimees" ("she's been drinking," Steve Carell says), it's award number two for Mad Max. Two Australian winners here in Colin Gibson and Lisa Thompson. I'm not sure if Jenny Beavan's prediction that the future could well look like this holds up to much scrutiny, but if it looks this cool, our species' long, slow demise might have some compensations. 

1:24pm: There's no thank-you scroll for Jenny Beavan, but she's going one better: she puts out a call for work, for herself and her colleagues in the costume department, by sharing her agent's contact details. Smart.

1:21pm: Jenny Beavan is English, but that's the first win for Mad Max: Fury Road. Will it be the first of many, or will that statuette be going home on his own tonight?

 

 

1:20pm: Cate Blanchett presents best costume design, and once again proves her incredible versatility: walking and talking. While wearing a slinky, slinky dress. Give that woman an award.

1:16pm: Wow. Alicia Vikander winning might not quite count as a shock, but it's certainly a surprise. To me, anyway. For mine, Rooney Mara was the standout in this category, though they are all great performances in great roles. Though, truth be told, Vikander's is a terrific performance in a mildly less impressive role, and she's given better turns elsewhere. Still, good luck to her - she's had a stellar year or two. 

1:09pm: Sarah Silverman: discuss.

Is she really freewheeling it as she claims? And where's her liquid marijuana when she needs it? She does score a cracker line on James Bond, though, offering definitive proof that he's not so great in the sack: "He's slept with 55 women in 24 films, and most of them end up wanting to kill him." 

1:07pm: Chris Rock is back on the issue of the shortage of roles for black actors. Cue clip from Joy, with Whoopi Goldberg playing a black cleaning lady, saying Jennifer Lawrences's Joy gets a movie just for inventing a mop but she'd have to find a cure for cancer just to get a TV movie. Tracy Morgan plays the Danish Girl - "this Danish is good, girl" - Chris Rock is a black astronaut stranded on Mars, while Kristen Wiig and Jeff Daniels bicker about whether spending "2500 white dollars" to bring a black astronaut home would spark a PR disaster. Funny. 

 

12:58pm: Well, there's a couple of second acts to tip your hat to: Tom McCarthy wins best original screenplay (with Josh Singer) for Spotlight, when his last film as director, The Cobbler, was deemed such a dog it couldn't even get a cinema release in Australia; and there's Adam McKay getting best adapted screenplay (with Charles Randolph) for The Big Short, his supremely accomplished adaptation of Michael Lewis's book, a riveting, dense and complex real-life thriller about the GFC. His last film was Anchorman 2. 

12:52pm: Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe have a mock squabble over the definition of an "adapted screenplay". "We have two Academy Awards between us," says Gosling. "Let's not squabble, it's beneath us." Crowe asks Gosling if he has an Oscar. "No, but you have two." Crowe says he only has one. "Let's agree to disagree," Gosling says. It's kind of a humble-brag skit, but it's pretty funny all the same.

 

 

12:50pm: So, that's our first glimpse of the "thank you" scroll - and it made barely a dint in the winners' desire to thank everyone all the way back to kindergarten. 

 

 

12:48pm: I'd have loved to see Ex Machina win, but Spotlight is pretty deserving. Wonder if they're beaming this into George Pell's hotel room? 

 

 

12:45pm: "You want diversity? We got diversity. Please welcome Emily Blunt and somebody whiter, Charlize Theron."

And that concludes a brilliant opening monologue from Chris Rock. Well done.

 

 

12:43pm: "It's not about boycotts. We want opportunities ... not just once. Leo gets a great part every year... what about the black actors? What about Jamie Foxx?  He as so good in Ray that they went to the hospital and unplugged the real Ray Charles. 'We don't need two of these'."

12:41pm: "Rocky takes place in a world where white athletes are as good as black athletes," says Rock. "Rocky is a sci-fi movie."

 

 

12:41pm: "Hollywood is sorority racist. 'We like you Rhonda, but you're not a Kappa.' But it's changing."

12:39pm: Chris Rock rocks it straight off the bat. "I thought about quitting," he says, over the absence of black acting nominees. "But why is it always people who don't have a job who tell you you should quit?"

 

 

 

 

12:36pm: Chris Rock rocks it straight off the bat. "I thought about quitting," over the absence of black acting nominees. "But why is it always people who don't have a job who tell you you should quit?"

12:34pm: We start off with a montage of clips from some of the biggest movies of 2015, the vast majority of them not among the nominees. That's the central contradiction of the Oscars in a nutshell. It pits prestige against popular, and it really doesn't know which side it's on.

12:29pm: Film is a visual medium, right? And we perceive visual media with the eyes, right? I may be going out on a limb here, but do you think that might be what the designers of the Oscars set had in mind? Like, just maybe? Blink and you'll ... actually, there's no way you can miss it.

 

 

12:17pm: Will Leo DiCaprio finally win that elusive acting Oscar (he's been nominated four times without a win, plus once for best picture as a producer of Wolf of Wall Street)? He's almost unbackable, but there's still time for the little gold man to slip out of his grasp. Maybe like this:

 

 

 

12:14pm: Speaking of Chris Rock, here's a pic he just posted on Instagram of him making last minute tweaks to said monologue, or "cutting the fat", as he put it.

 

 

12:06pm: Chris Rock is hosting for the second time, and a lot of the interest in this year's ceremony will be in how he handles the #oscarssowhite issue. According to one gossip site Rock was "nervous as hell" about his opening monologue, and "wondering if he'd made the right choice". My advice: treat those comments from "a source" with a healthy dose of scepticism. Rock has never been afraid to stir the pot, and there's a lot of support across the board for the push for greater diversity in Hollywood – gender, ethnic, sexual orientation – so he's got very little to be afraid of if he does go there. And he almost certainly will.

12:01pm: Well, folks, here we go. The 88th awards of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences – that's the Oscars to you and me – and Australian talent is represented like never before: 10 nominations for Mad Max: Fury Road, one for Cate Blanchett in Carol, with 15 Australians in the hunt all up. Will it be gold, gold, gold for Australia, or is this set to be a year of disappointment? And will the #oscarssowhite controversy overshadow everything else? Stay tuned to our live blog to find out.