Hamptons Fans Shine at 88th Academy Awards

The 88th Academy Awards had some Hamptons highlights on Sunday night, February 28.

Of course the night’s big news was Montauk fan Leonardo DiCaprio‘s Best Actor win for his role as frontiersman Hugh Glass in Best Director winner Alejandro González Iñárritu‘s The Revenant. DiCaprio was a favorite coming into the Oscars. Before Sunday’s ceremony, the actor already took home Best Actor statues at the SAG Awards, Golden Globes and Critic’s Choice Awards.

DiCaprio had previously earned Academy Award nominations in 1993 for Best Supporting Actor in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? and for Best Actor in 2005 (The Aviator), 2006 (Blood Diamond) and 2013 (The Wolf of Wall Street). He was also nominated, as producer, for the Best Picture award for The Wolf of Wall Street in 2013, but DiCaprio had yet to take home the gold.

Montauk resident Julianne Moore presented DiCaprio with his long-awaited Oscar.

Shelter Island resident Louis C.K. also made an appearance on the 2016 Academy Awards show and, some say, made a such a splash people are talking about him being a candidate to host the a future Academy Awards show. The comedian, who presented the award for Best Documentary Short, talked about the passion of the creators of such shorts who do what the other big-name nominees do—but without the reward of celebrity and huge paychecks.

“This Oscar is going home in a Honda Civic,” C.K. quipped, getting big laughs from the crowd and viewers at home.

In other Oscar news, the Hamptons International Film Festival (HIFF) has just been named as a qualifying festival for Academy Awards in documentary and narrative film categories.

HIFF 2015 Centerpiece film Spotlight won the Academy Award for Best Picture last night. Mark Rylance won Best Supporting Actor for East Hampton resident Steven Spielberg‘s Bridge of Spies, and Brie Larsen won Best Actress for Room—both films also screened at HIFF in 2015.