The Best Picture race, whether there are five nominees, eight, ten, or if they expand it to twenty, always comes down to two or maybe three films. For there to be even three titles legitimately in the mix is unusual. Most years there is a clear favorite, if not an outright assumed winner, and one other that could, conceivably, upset it...though it almost never does. But this has turned into a year where three movies seem to have legitimate shots at winning, and possibly even a fourth as that wild card (in this case, very wild). Leaving the final award of the night an actual mystery, for once. Can hardly wait to find out which one it will be.
Right off the bat, you can pretty much throw out any of the Best Picture nominees that don't have their directors nominated. This year that would be
Bridge of Spies, Brooklyn, and
The Martian. Movies without a corresponding director nomination have won before. I mean it
just happened three years ago with
Argo and Ben Affleck. But before that it hadn't happened since
Driving Miss Daisy (1989) and Bruce Beresford (Oliver Stone won for
Born on the Fourth of July). Before that, you have to go all the way back to first few years of the Academy Awards.
In 1932
Grand Hotel won Best Picture without Edmund Goulding being nominated (Frank Borzage won for
Bad Girl), and at the very first Academy Awards
Wings won Best Picture while William Wellman went unnominated. But for those first two misses, it should be noted that the format of the Oscars (which hadn't even been given the nickname "Oscar" yet) was very different.
Wings was one of only three nominees for what was called "Outstanding Picture", though they also had a similar category called "Unique and Outstanding Production", which also had three nominees and
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans won that. By the second Academy Awards, those two were combined for a single Best Picture award, with five nominees. That first ceremony also had Best Director split between Drama and Comedy categories, with five total nominees (two comedy, three drama). That was similarly blended into a single Best Director category in the second year, though they allowed seven nominees. The year
Grand Hotel won, the fifth ceremony, there were eight Picture nominees but only three Best Directors.
So if you throw out those first two instances when the Academy Awards were still playing with the format quite a bit, in all the decades since it stabilized with five Best Director nominees, it's just
Driving Miss Daisy and
Argo in all those years to win Best Picture without a nomination for the director. Is it going to happen again? Sure, at some point. Is it going to happen this year with
Bridge of Spies, Brooklyn or
The Martian, just a few years after
Argo? Nope.
To make the Best Picture race truly interesting, I think there really has to be the possibility of a split between Picture and Director. It is certainly not uncommon for those two awards to go to different films, though the norm is for them to match. So far in the 21st Century it has become relatively common, compared to the five or six decades that ended the 1900s, to have a split now and again. In the fifteen most recent Oscars, from
Birdman on back to
Gladiator, Picture and Director have matched ten of the fifteen years. But two of the last three were mismatches. Iñárritu and
Birdman of course won last year, but before that
12 Years A Slave won Picture while Alfonso Cuarón won Director for
Gravity, and
Argo won Picture though Ang Lee won Director for
Life of Pi (again, Affleck was not even nominated for Director).
The Revenant seemed like the immediate favorite when the nominations were announced, and since then Alejandro Iñárritu has emerged even more clearly as the heavy favorite for Best Director (see
this thread). But while
The Revenant may well still win Best Picture, it seems that both
Spotlight and
The Big Short have picked up some serious ground in recent weeks, and
The Revenant is no lock to win, even if Iñárritu does.
The Revenant is a very brutal, bleak movie. Not that brutal and bleak movies haven't won before, but in comparison to
The Big Short and
Spotlight, it is a cinematic ordeal. That is its strength, of course, that it is an immersive experience, and why the direction and cinematography are such heavy favorites in their categories. But will the overall Oscar votership go for it? They certainly could.
12 Years A Slave, The Hurt Locker, No Country for Old Men, and
The Departed are recent winners that could broadly be described as major bummers, even if in a couple of them the protagonists actually survive their ordeals. So the Academy isn't afraid of going dark and brooding and punishing. But that does contrast
The Revenant pretty sharply with both
Spotlight and
The Big Short, both of which are serious subjects, but not presented in the unrelenting style that
The Revenant employs.
Besides its darkness and intensity, the main marker that has me questioning whether
The Revenant can really win, from a Oscar history buff perspective, is that its screenplay is not nominated. As rare as it is for a film to win Best Picture without its director being nominated, it is almost as rare for one to win without the screenplay getting a nod. Doesn't have to win, but at least be one of the ten nominated screenplays. Once again throwing out those initial years of the Academy Awards where they were figuring out the format, in the many decades since then there have been exactly three movies that won Best Picture without their screenplay being nominated. They are Larry Olivier's
Hamlet (1948), Robert Wise's
The Sound of Music (1965), and James Cameron's
Titanic (1997). That's it. Olivier refused to take a writing credit for the adaptation, meaning it is officially credited to Billy Shakespeare alone, Rodgers & Hammerstein's
The Sound of Music was a Broadway smash before it was adapted into the movie, and for all of its spectacle I think anybody other than twelve-year-old girls must acknowledge that
Titanic has some absolutely dreadful dialogue.
The Revenant was partially adapted from a novel of the same name which tells a version of the true life story of famous fur-trapping mountain man Hugh Glass, who was indeed mauled by a Grizzly and managed through sheer force of will to survive after being left for dead by the men he was traveling with. The same core story was adapted into the 1971 film
Man in the Wilderness starring Richard Harris. Iñárritu's film is extremely visual, and there are huge stretches of the running time where DiCaprio's Glass is alone, barely alive, hiding from men or animals, and doesn't have a syllable of actual written dialogue. Which is probably why it didn't make the cut for screenplay. But the question becomes is
The Revenant so strong and beloved and respected by the Academy voters that it is going to triumph the way
Hamlet, The Sound of Music, and
Titanic did? I have my serious doubts. If it does, it joins that very small list. But if you just want to play the odds of Oscar history, there is at least enough doubt there to knock it off of its early front-running perch.
Which leaves room for speculation.
Speaking of room,
Room, though it is nominated for Best Director, doesn't seem to have the proverbial snowball's chance of actually winning Best Picture. I like this movie A LOT, and if I was filling out an actual Oscar ballot, I may even slot it as my number one choice. But while I think it is fantastic that it got as many high profile nominations as it did, and that Bree Larson is the heavy favorite to win Best Actress, I can't imagine any scenario where it actually wins, here. It is one of those yearly instances where it is truly an honor to have been nominated.
The Big Short has an all-star cast and it is on a serious subject, thought it takes an irreverent and inventive approach to presenting that subject matter as a feature narrative. Its director, Adam McKay, is nominated for both Best Director and for co-writing the screenplay, from Michael Lewis' non-fiction best seller. It is a heavy favorite to win Adapted Screenplay, but does that all add up to a Best Picture win? A few weeks ago, it seemed very unlikely, but in addition to whatever intangible "buzz" it may have as more people, including Oscar voters, actually get to see it, the feather it has in its cap that absolutely MUST insert it into the conversation for Best Picture, is that it won the Producers Guild Award. Unlike the Directors Guild, the Producers Guild does not have as long a history with their year-end award, but it does usually mirror the eventual winner for Best Picture. Usually, not always.
The PGA Award has been around since 1989, when
Driving Miss Daisy won their inaugural honor. It also won Best Picture at the Oscars. In the subsequent twenty-five years, the PGA winner and the Academy Award winner have differed only seven times. Those differences were
The Crying Game/Unforgiven, Apollo 13/Braveheart, Saving Private Ryan/Shakespeare in Love, Moulin Rouge!/A Beautiful Mind, The Aviator/Million Dollar Baby, Brokeback Mountain/Crash and
Little Miss Sunshine/The Departed. So they had three "misses" in a row there in the middle of the last decade, with
The Aviator, Brokeback Mountain, and
Little Miss Sunshine, but none since (though they did cheat a bit and had a tie two years ago with
12 Years A Slave and
American Hustle). Is
The Big Short going to be another anomaly, the first such one in nine years?
The Golden Globe Awards that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association gives out are often not the best predictor for Best Picture since they have two categories for the top films of the year, Drama and Comedy/Musical (however they choose to define what a comedy is versus what's a drama). It is also a
completely different and much, much smaller voting body than the industry awards, which have at least some overlap with the Academy voter pool. However, since this may be a year where the PGA seems like it is giving a different signal than other awards, let's go back to see what they did in January.
The Revenant won the Golden Globe for Best Picture Drama, over
Spotlight, Room, Carol, and
Mad Max: Fury Road. The Golden Globe for Comedy or Musical went to the wacky Disco-fueled hijinks of
The Martian over
Joy, Spy, Trainwreck and
The Big Short. Although yet another problematic predictor that is only accurate half the time, the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Cast, which some like to equate to Best Picture, that went to
Spotlight over
Beasts of No Nation, Trumbo, Straight Outta Compton and
The Big Short.
So though it won the prestigious Producers Guild Award,
The Big Short did NOT win either of the Golden Globes or the SAG Award. Since the PGA has moved from what used to be five nominees and expanded to ten as well as moving to the same “preferential voting system” that the Academy started using at the same time (seven years ago), the PGA winner has matched Oscar every time. And though there isn’t complete overlap in membership, another reason the PGA is used as a great indicator is that they have a similarly sized voting body.
Since they have changed to the preferential voting, has a movie won the PGA and Oscar without winning a Golden Globe, SAG for Cast, or the DGA Award? No.
The Hurt Locker did not win the Golden Globe for Drama (
Avatar) nor the SAG (
Inglourious Basterds), but Kathryn Bigleow
did get the DGA Award (as well as the Oscar). That’s the closest a Best Picture winner has come to losing all of the other big awards leading up to the end, and still managed to win. The PGA is really the only award
The Big Short has won, this season. Is it alone strong enough to float it to the top of the Oscar ballots?
So how about
Spotlight this awards season? It did win the SAG for cast, which is right only 50% of the time, but did not win a Globe, nor the PGA, nor the DGA. But could it win Best Picture? For as inventive as
The Big Short’s narrative is and for as immersive and stark as
The Revenant is,
Spotlight is very traditional, by comparison. It employs nothing especially fancy as it tells its story of the
Boston Globe reporters who uncovered proof that the Catholic Church was well aware of the abuse problems and was systematically moving offending Priests from parish to parish. The cast is excellent, but in narrative and stylistic terms it follows a pretty standard formula, even if it applies that formula very well. It is a good movie, but other than the story itself there is nothing very memorable, cinematically speaking. In a year with some very flashy and intense choices, will this throwback drama be the one that manages to rise to the top and actually win Best Picture?
Spotlight is a rarity in that it is a positive story about journalism. Most of the great films with journalism as a subject use it as a whipping boy, be it
The Sweet Smell of Success, Ace in the Hole, A Face in the Crowd, Shattered Glass, Nightcrawler, or even
Citizen Kane. There definitely are other great movies about the good journalism can do, like
Good Night and Good Luck, The Killing Fields and
All the President's Men, the latter being the most obvious cousin to
Spotlight. Most of the 21st Century movies about journalists seem to be preoccupied with relevance in a new media age while
Spotlight really is old fashioned in that it just wants to show how a huge scandal like this can be revealed, piece by piece, source by source.
And then of course there is that freakiest-deakiest of all wild cards,
Max Max: Fury Road. If Alejandro Iñárritu doesn’t win Best Director, surely it will be the 70-year-old Aussie George Miller who does. There were thirty years between the release of the third Mad Max film,
Beyond Thunderdome, and
Fury Road. Mel Gibson wasn’t back as the title character, but Miller and his mayhem were. It was a hit and incredibly well reviewed, currently idling at a massively impressive 97% on Rotten Tomatoes. It is insane and brutal and kinetic. Gloriously so.
Furiosaly so. It has racked up all sorts of critics prizes and its fanbase is as loyal as a paint-inhaling War Boy. Its fans have convinced themselves that in this year when there is no clear frontrunner, something like
Schindler’s List or
Titanic, that George Miller is going to triumph as Best Director and that
Mad Max: Fury Road is going to plow ahead and explode as Best Picture come Oscar night. That kind of passion is cool, it’s what makes being a cinema nerd fun, and it may increase the viewership of this particular ceremony, with fanboys and fangirls making a drinking game out of the evening, bolting back full cans of Fosters for every win it amasses, and early on when the technical awards are given it should do very nicely indeed. But actually winning Best Picture?
I really don’t see it happening. Obviously it
can happen, it is on the ballot unlike any other number of recent blockbusters from
The Dark Knight to
Star Wars: The Force Awakens. As I listed above when talking about
The Revenant, yes, the Academy can get dark and weird in their Best Picture choice, from time to time. I mean
Silence of the Lambs won Best Picture, what more evidence do you need? But no Sci-Fi film has ever won. As beloved as the genre is globally, even more pronounced over the past couple decades when filmmaking technology finally caught up with some of the fantastical things the genre can imagine, the Academy doesn’t go for this type of thing. Not in numbers enough to win. Yes, the cumlination of Tolkien's Fantasy epic
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King won just about every award there is, including Best Picture, and Sci-Fi films as diverse as
A Clockwork Orange, Star Wars (1977),
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Avatar, District 9, Inception and if you want to include them
Gravity and this year’s
The Martian, along with
Fury Road, have garnered Best Picture nominations. Even
Avatar, which was then the biggest box office champ of all time having passed Cameron’s own
Titanic, didn’t pull off the win, though. Classics of the genre including
2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kid, Alien, Blade Runner, The Thing, The Terminator, Back to the Future, Jurassic Park and on and on were never even nominated for Best Picture. None of them were able to get it done...but it’s going to be the fourth
Mad Max movie that does?
Mad Max: Fury Road is so much kick-ass fun, but thinking that is what the Oscars reward for Best Picture is either forward thinking or being completely blind. Movie nerds would absolutely lose their ***** if it was called for the final award of the night, but it is very unlikely to happen. If it does, what a lovely day, and may your chained up electric guitar player’s riff echo to the gates of Valhalla. But when it doesn’t, and
The Revenant or
The Big Short or
Spotlight is called, try not to break too much stuff in your house, or to road rage some poor unsuspecting mini-van in protest.
What about total number of nominations? Doesn't the film with the most noms wind up winning? As with most Oscar trivia, well, I mean
sometimes, yeah. This year for these four I am focusing on,
The Revenant has the most nominations of anything at twelve,
Mad Max: Fury Road two behind at ten,
Spotlight six, and
The Big Short has five. Last year the Picture winner,
Birdman, did have the highest number of nominations, nine, tied with
The Grand Budapest Hotel. And in 2012,
The King's Speech had the most nominations in the field, with twelve. But in 2014, both
Gravity and
American Hustle had ten nominations to
12 Years a Slave's nine. In 2013
Lincoln towered over all with a dozen noms,
Life of Pi had eleven, while the Best Picture winner
Argo had only seven. In 2012 Scorsese's
Hugo had one more nomination, eleven, than the winner
The Artist.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button had thirteen nominations to winner
Slumdog Millionaire's ten. And when
The Hurt Locker bested
Avatar, they both were tied coming in with nine nominations each.
The Revenant may win Best Picture, but it having more than twice as many nominations as
The Big Short doesn't mean one has a lock over the other.
Given
ALL of that, with no obvious winner sitting there waiting to be anointed, if I had to guess...I think it is going to be
Spotlight that ultimately prevails and is named the next Best Picture by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In a year full of bleak stories up for Best Picture, it is the one that perhaps is the most positive. It’s about good old fashioned journalism and truth and the powerful being taken to task instead of getting away with it. It’s an underdog story in that sense, not as adrenaline-pumping as
Rocky, but with a well earned righteousness of good triumphing over evil (or if not triumphing, at least exposing it).
The Revenant is about survival and revenge,
The Big Short a largely comic look at how things got so damn bad but while those handful of smart people figured it out nobody was able to stop it and nothing much has changed, and
Fury Road is a wonderfully chaotic train of pure cinema that doesn’t stop moving. I think among those choices, the more narratively conservative and relatively uplifting story is the one that will rise to the top. It may not be listed first on a lot of those Academy ballots, but it’ll be second and third, and in a year where there is no clear cut front runner, that may be exactly what it takes.
Gonna be fun finding out, anyway.
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