Oscar surprises? Rylance leads the list

My Oscar ballot got trashed fairly early last night. But, then, I'm hardly the only one who guessed wrong on the Motion Picture Academy's voting at the 88th Oscars broadcast.

In retrospect, it's understandable that "Spotlight" should win for Best Picture over "The Revenant." Though "The Revenant" took home Best Director for Alejandro González Iñárritu and Best Actor for Leonardo DiCaprio, it wasn't even nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay. "Spotlight," aside from being one of the Oscar favorites, was the winner of Best Original Screenplay (for Josh Singer and director Tom McCarthy). So, clearly, story counts — or at least did so this time.

More surprising, though, was the win for Best Visual Effects by "Ex Machina." While "Mad Max: Fury Road" won nearly every other technical award, six in all including Best Editing, the smaller-budget but impressively done "Ex Machina" triumphed.

Most surprising of all? Mark Rylance's win over Sylvester Stallone for Best Supporting Actor. Not that Rylance isn't deserving. His quiet but effective portrayal of Soviet spy Rudolf Abel in "Bridge of Spies" is only the latest in a long line of performances the stage actor is known for.

In fact, if you want to catch an even better Rylance performance, check out the BBC/PBS Masterpiece Theatre production "Wolf Hall." In the six-part miniseries adapted from Hilary Mantel's award-winning novel, Rylance plays Thomas Cromwell — successor to Cardinal Wolsey as Henry VIII's chief minister. And he is superb as a conscientious man playing a political game as adviser to the sociopathic English monarch (played by Damian Lewis).

Oscar, as usual, confounds — even when it gets things right.