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When the ratings fell by over 17 per cent last year with Oscar nominations sounding like Spirit Independent Awards (a generous dose of indie films were celebrated last year), we knew that the Academy this year would want to hit back with a vengeance and go back to honouring mainstream films to get the audience to tune into what used to be showbiz’s biggest and most watched night.
Which is why it was no surprise when the Academy had picked Mad Max: Fury Road (10 nominations) and The Martian (seven nominations) apart from The Revenant (12 nominations) that started out as an Academy favourite after Birdman -Iñárritu’s Oscar glory last year. Spotlight was at number four with six nominations and The Big Short got five.
So how did the underdog film Spotlight win the top prize that was largely seen as a two-way duel between Mad Max: Fury Road and The Revenant — two spectacularly mounted films made by passionate filmmakers in extreme conditions (for the love of cinema)?
While Mad Max left us breathless with its scale and pretty much swept all awards in the first ten months of the year (some 73 of them), The Revenant started its publicity campaign with a negative story broken by Hollywood Reporter (“How Leonardo DiCaprio’s The Revenant shoot became a living hell”) on July 31.
The “negative” story promptly updated itself with a blurb quoting Iñárritu: When you see the film, you will see the scale of it. And you will say, 'Wow’.
Three madmen went to the end of the icy world to create an epic and were rewarded for it. ~ Photos: Reuters
Subsequent stories of DiCaprio eating raw bison liver and the madness of the director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki’s vision to shoot the film in natural light in minus-20 temperatures for a film Iñárritu insisted on shooting linearly had pretty much convinced everyone that The Revenant was about three mad men who had gone to the end of the world to create an epic. It was no surprise that these three men were rewarded in what should rightfully be called the Oscar for Best PR. The Revenant is a film that is just another déjà-vu-filled survival story (probably the best-shot of them all) in the tradition of Castaway (which the Oscars snubbed for trying too hard), 127 Hours , Wrecked and Apocalypto .
Spotlight , however, arrived late to the party. It came into running for the Oscars only when American Film Institute included it in its Top 10 films of the year (along with The Big Short ) in December after a November 6 release. Most of the films on AFI’s list made it to the Best Picture nominees.
In January, when the nominations were announced, all hell broke loose given the glaring omissions of black nominees for the second year in a row.
#OscarsSoWhite trended on social networks, forcing the President of Academy, Cheryl Boone Isaacs, to acknowledge the lapse and promise immediate remedial measures including review of membership policies.
Also in January, Spotlight won at the Critics Choice awards (Best Picture and Best Ensemble) and also the Screen Actor’s Guild award (Outstanding cast in a motion picture), taking its tally to over 100 awards by February when news broke that Spotlight was screened for a Vatican Commission on clerical sex abuse.
Spotlight was a taut film with smart writing, integrity and purpose of a kind rarely executed with such conviction. A no-nonsense investigative drama about a team of journalists cracking a pattern of sex scandals, tracking the aftermath and backing up what everyone around them knew but didn’t want to talk about.
Knowing fully well that they would be seen as attacking the sacred Church, this was the story of a diligent team of journalists who believed that their readers must know the truth, however difficult to comprehend and accept, and presented it to them with verified documentation of crime and cover-up. It was never an easy film to make but director Todd McCarthy and writer Josh Singer believed it was important to bring journalism back into focus.
“The motive was to tell the story accurately while showing the power of the newsroom — something that’s largely disappeared today. This story is important. Journalism is important, and there is a deeper message in the story,” as Josh Singer revealed in an interview to Creative Screenwriting .
Newspapers were beginning to shut shop around the world and shifting online as readers were getting used to consuming news in 140 characters. Investigative stories, the longform features that required thorough fact-checking and long-drawn verification were becoming increasingly rare as news desks were becoming obsessed with Breaking News. This was a relevant story.
Given the nature of voting for Best Picture (where the voters had to rate the films in the order of preference) as opposed to just picking one for the other categories, Spotlight stood a good chance especially with the boost from the Critics Choice and SAG awards.
Here was a chance for Academy members to set things right politically, fix the racist image and show that only cinema truly mattered.
Sylvester Stallone, a favourite for the Best Supporting Actor after his Golden Globes win (accompanied by standing ovation) was going to be first casualty. If Creed himself didn’t get nominated, Rocky Balboa had no business winning.
The white guilt didn’t allow rewarding a white man making a mainstream action film for the top prize in a controversial year. George Miller had to be snubbed.
The Academy voter decided to honour Iñárritu for a second consecutive year and Lubezki for a third time and finally gave DiCaprio his long due Oscar (the only three awards it won out of 12 nominations) whereas Mad Max swept the technical awards as expected after peaking early and won six out of the ten categories.
With this two-way split between the technical categories and showy categories, it’s easy to deduce that The Revenant and Mad Max: Fury Road divided, probably polarised, and ate into each others votes and sent Spotlight up on the preferential scale.
Heartfelt or projected, white guilt is real. In fact, as Chris Rock sent his girl scouts to sell cookies and raise funds at the Oscars, we knew it worth at least 65,243 dollars fished out of millionaire pockets.
When DiCaprio said “Climate change is real,” before signing off his acceptance speech, we couldn’t help thinking about the metaphor.
With Spotlight bringing journalism back into focus and a Best Picture win bringing cinema back into the spotlight, maybe the climate is changing.
As ratings plummeted by another eight per cent this year (probably with snubbing of deserving black nominees in a year where Tangerine , Creed and Straight Outta Compton were produced), the Academy has a lot to think about.
But this year, the right things happened on Oscar night. Even if for the wrong reasons.
