As we arrive at the middle of 2015, it's only prudent to look back over the year's first half to try to identify which films and people have the strongest shot at being remembered by the Academy after year's end.
As it turns 40 this year, Industrial Light & Magic can claim to have played a defining role making effects for 317 movies. Pixar began, essentially, as an ILM internal investigation. Photoshop was invented, in part, by an ILM employee tinkering with programming in his time away from work. Billions of lines of code have been formulated there. Along the way ILM has put tentacles into pirate beards, turned a man into mercury, and dominated box office charts with computer-generated dinosaurs and superheroes.
"The Grand Budapest Hotel" cleaned up and took home all of the ones you’d expect a critically acclaimed Wes Anderson movie to win (Production Design, Costume Design, Makeup And Hairstyling, Original Score), John Legend and Common’s “Glory” won Best Original Song after a performance that brought David Oyelowo to tears, Eddie Redmayne and Patricia Arquette helped "The Theory Of Everything" and "Boyhood" avoid total shutouts by winning Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress (respectively), and Julianne Moore won for "Still Alice."
Megan Fox was named worst supporting actress for "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles," while Kelsey Grammer won worst supporting actor for his work in four films -- "The Expendables 3," "Legends of Oz: Dorothy's Return," "Think Like a Man Too" and "Transformers: Age of Extinction."
The crop of winners includes two accolades for "Nightcrawler," two for "Boyhood," and three for "Birdman," including Best Feature. "Whiplash" also did well, and in general the Indie Spirit awards this year lined up very strongly with the Oscar predictions we and many other people have made. Check out all the winners for the Independent Spirit Awards 2015 below.