Spotlight may have only won two Oscars at the 88th Academy Awards, but one of its wins was the most important of all — Best Picture. In doing so, it became the first Best Picture winner since 1952’s The Greatest Show on Earth to win just two Oscars. So how did Spotlight pull off a victory over flashier films like The Revenant, Mad Max: Fury Road, The Big Short, and The Martian?
The 2015 Oscar race was one of the most unpredictable in years, due to the lack of an obvious frontrunner. Recent years had featured films that won just about every precursor and thus made the Best Picture race drama-free, like Argo and The Artist, while in other years, films came on strong with precursors at the very end and dethroned suspected frontrunners, like The King’s Speech winning over The Social Network and Birdman defeating Boyhood. 2015 was different animal, in that support was split multiple ways through the entire season, with frontrunners waxing and waning.
Spotlight, about the team of Boston Globe journalists who uncovered the sex abuse scandals within the Catholic Church, was not the most razzle-dazzle movie in the Best Picture lineup. It does not have capital-A Acting or sumptuous visuals or overt moments meant to cater to the audience. Its characters wear drab clothing, pouring over documents and legal filings in cramped offices. Its plot is presented in a straightforward manner without devolving into truth-stretching to make journalism feel more “exciting.” In many ways, Spotlight‘s subtlety flies in the face of what we all thought a Best Picture winner could look like, but there’s a reason the film received enough votes to clinch a win over its fellow nominees. Let’s explore Spotlight‘s victory at the Oscars and determine whether it will ultimately stand the test of time.
The Socio-Political Climate
The Oscars created a major firestorm by not nominating any actors of color for the second year in a row. There were a few POC contenders who received nominations from precursor awards, including Will Smith for Concussion and, most notably, Idris Elba for Beasts of No Nation, who actually won the SAG Award for Best Supporting Actor. There was a negative electricity in the air, especially after writer April Reign put a name to the controversy — #OscarsSoWhite. The drama continued to spiral, with major news outlets running with the story, and AMPAS President Cheryl Boone Isaacs soon announced a new measure to significantly increase their diverse membership by the year 2020. Chris Rock, the host of the Oscars in 2016, addressed the controversy in the night’s opening monologue, which suggested that the Academy was willing to admit they needed to do better.
Meanwhile, there was growing tension about the kinds of films the Academy tended to reward. Many Oscar bloggers and pop culture critics were writing about how the Academy had become entirely self-obsessed, having awarded Best Picture to films about show business in three of the last four years (2011’s silent-era nostalgia piece The Artist, 2012’s “Hollywood defeats terrorism” thriller Argo, and 2014’s anxiety-ridden, high concept/superhero-bashing Birdman). Entertainment had become (and continues to be) so niche, that it seemed like the Academy was only going to reward films that appealed specifically to their taste, while also providing a nice ego-stroke in such uncertain times for the industry. Luckily, there were no 2015 films about Hollywood in the Best Picture lineup, so there was a nice change of pace.
Yet, the producers behind one nominated film certainly dabbled in the Hollywood ego-stroking, and they almost got away with it. More on that later.
The Campaign
Spotlight debuted to glowing reviews at the Venice Film Festival in September, cementing it as an awards contender. Many had been looking to Venice for potential awards-friendly films, with Birdman premiering at the festival the year before. The film was also screened at the Telluride Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival, each of them adding to the buzz. Spotlight began picking up nominations from organizations both big and small, and some proclaimed it to be the Oscar frontrunner from early on. However, there was still a question of whether the Academy would take to a film so understated in its approach.
Such unease was also present because of Spotlight‘s distribution studio, Open Road Films. The studio had very little experience in the awards world, with only 2014’s Nightcrawler coming anywhere close to such acclaim. With major studios like Paramount (The Big Short), 20th Century Fox (The Revenant) and Warner Bros. (Mad Max: Fury Road) in the mix, how could a virtually unexperienced studio compete? Open Road gradually proved competitive, though, hosting a series of Q&As with the cast alongside the real-life journalists they played, which surely created a compelling personal element for Academy members preparing to cast their votes.
Spotlight did not suffer the backlash of some of its fellow nominees, even from the Catholic Church. In fact, some from the Church acknowledged how painful yet essential the film was, in forcing them to confront the past (and in some cases, the present) of their organization. Such positive press only helped Spotlight become one of the only films in the Oscar race to be controversy-free, which has become increasingly difficult in today’s righteous Twitter activists.
Spotlight earned six Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor for Mark Ruffalo, Best Supporting Actress for Rachel McAdams, Best Director for Tom McCarthy, Best Original Screenplay for McCarthy and Josh Singer, and Best Film Editing for Tom McArdle.
The Other Nominees
The ultimate nominees for Best Picture in 2015 were a prime example of the perils of great expectations. Movies like Joy, Steve Jobs, and The Danish Girl were all hyped up significantly in early 2015 as potential Oscar frontrunners, and while they would end up with a handful of nominations, none were even able to get in for Best Picture. Instead, we saw movies emerge naturally throughout the year that very few could have predicted beforehand.
The most significant instance of an unexpected film staking its claim that year as an awards contender was Mad Max: Fury Road. Suffice to say that Oscar bloggers didn’t exactly expect the fourth film in the Mad Max universe to become a double-digit nominee, even after the overwhelmingly positive reviews. Action-adventure films had certainly been nominated and rewarded before, but Fury Road was an entirely unique beast — an aggressive thunderpunch of a movie that essentially created its own cinematic language. There was no precedent for it, but Academy members were perceptive enough to recognize its meticulous craftsmanship by giving it 10 nominations, including Best Picture. Unfortunately, it may have been a little too bold to get enough Academy voters to award it Best Picture, though it did walk away with six other wins.
The other major blockbuster in the race was The Martian, a crowd-pleasing adaptation of the Andy Weir novel of the same name about a man stranded on Mars who struggles to survive. The film took up the space/sci-fi slot we see almost every year in the Best Picture lineup, and like those other movies, The Martian could not overcome genre bias and go all the way and win Best Picture, nor anything else despite seven nominations.
On the other end of the spectrum we had traditional Oscar-friendly fare in the Best Picture lineup in the form of Bridge of Spies and Brooklyn. Neither film came anywhere close to frontrunner status, but Cold War drama Bridge of Spies proved why Steven Spielberg remains one of the best mid-budget directors of our time, while Brooklyn showed the power of a simple story well told.
Room was 2015’s indie drama-that-could, a harrowing yet ultimately cathartic film made great by Brie Larson and Jacob Tremblay’s stellar performances. Larson swept every major Best Actress award including the Oscar, but few were expecting director Lenny Abrahamson to get into Best Director, over the likes of Ridley Scott (The Martian), Steven Spielberg (Bridge of Spies) and Todd Haynes (Carol). This probably means Room was closer to the top half of the Best Picture nominees than the bottom, but it was probably too intimate in scope to clinch a win.
The Big Short was one of the three films that were truly in contention for Best Picture after getting nominated at every precursor, and winning the Producers Guild of America Award. The film, which breaks down the 2008 financial crisis in America and features an all-star cast that includes Brad Pitt, Ryan Gosling, Steve Carell and Christian Bale, was in a great position to take home the big prize. Since 2007, the winner of Best Picture at the Producers Guild went on to win Best Picture at the Oscars, and The Big Short pulling off a surprise upset there certainly felt like a momentum shift. Yet, it was not able to go all the way, perhaps because the film simply doesn’t have the same gravity or emotional pull as others in this category.
Finally we get to The Revenant. As I alluded to, there was one movie in the Best Picture lineup that did its best to appeal to Academy members’ sense of importance, and that movie was The Revenant. The survival epic, directed by the previous year’s Best Director winner, Alejandro G. Iñárritu, featured star Leonardo DiCaprio trudging through snow and mud, sleeping in bear skin, eating raw bison liver, and much more. Iñárritu, DiCaprio and others involved with the film were out there talking in every interview about how hard it was to make to the film, yet they ultimately carried on for the sake of art. I don’t wish to discredit how difficult it was to make The Revenant — the evidence is on the screen — but the fact of the matter is, every movie-making process is hard work. To suggest that Iñárritu and company sacrificed more for their art, thus appealing to Hollywood’s sense of importance, was simply unfounded. Academy members were still impressed, though, giving it 12 nominations (the most that year) and awarding Iñárritu his second consecutive win as well as the very-overdue DiCaprio his first Oscar. So how did an epic like The Revenant with its behind-the-scenes story of suffering artists lose Best Picture?
The Final Vote
The Best Picture race ultimately came down to three films — The Big Short, The Revenant, and Spotlight. All three films performed extremely well throughout the precursors, and took home one major industry award each. The Big Short won the PGA Award, The Revenant won the Directors Guild of America Award (DGA), and Spotlight won the Screen Actors Guild Award (SAG) for Best Ensemble. It is incredibly rare for these awards to go to three different films, which made for a compelling race to the finish.
With 12 nominations, The Revenant was thought to be a frontrunner considering The Big Short and Spotlight had each received just six and five nominations, respectively. Of course, the showiness of The Revenant compared to the modern, indoor settings of the other two films made it easy for the former to rack up double-digit nominations, but it still felt like The Revenant was the behemoth in the race. Plus, The Big Short and Spotlight could have hypothetically split the vote considering they are both about major cultural moments in contemporary America, while The Revenant is its own entity altogether. Even if The Revenant had a lot of passionate supporters in the Academy, it would eventually end up losing, and that’s due to one very important aspect: the preferential voting system.
The Revenant is the kind of film you either get swept up in and proclaim it to be your favorite movie of the year, or you just don’t get the hype at all and think it’s a slog. In the Best Picture voting system, this means there would be many voters who rank it at no. 1, while others put it towards the bottom. The Revenant may well have had the most no. 1 votes on the initial ballots, but clearly it wasn’t enough to reach a majority. This means the accountants would take the lowest scoring film from the first round, let’s say it’s Brooklyn, out of contention. The accountants look at those ballots’ no. 2 votes, which are then added to the totals of the films still active in the race. This proceeds forward until a majority is achieved.
Spotlight is the kind of film that people wouldn’t actively hate enough to rank it low, and that’s how it likely won in the end. Those who were captivated by the story ranked it at no. 1, and even those who didn’t have it at the top likely had it at no. 2 or no. 3. The Revenant was a very polarizing movie, and The Big Short certainly had its detractors as well, while Spotlight was the movie everyone could agree on.
The Film Itself
How did Spotlight become the film Academy voters could agree upon as a worthy Best Picture? It may not have flashy moments like The Revenant or The Big Short, but its emotional core is undeniable. The film takes a meta approach by presenting the facts of exactly how this team of Boston Globe journalists brought the Catholic Church sex abuse scandals to light, without going for dramatic flair. Like a well-researched article, Spotlight does not try to guide you to one conclusion or the other — it gives you the facts, sequentially, just as they happened, and lets the viewer/reader make up their mind from there. The movie does not try to make journalism glamorous; it shows the grunt work. We see these reporters sifting through documents, huddling in decaying offices, getting doors slammed in their faces, deliberating over whether to trust their sources. There are no egomaniacal bosses with political agendas, no reporters shouting and getting in people’s faces to get the story, no triumphant “gotcha” moment. In the end, even after they have broken the big story, it’s back to work on Monday, answering phones and doing their jobs.
The ensemble nature of Spotlight ultimately lends to its success. The film has major stars like Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, and Rachel McAdams, yet none of the performances feel like “star turns.” They are all in service of telling the story right, just like the characters they play. While Ruffalo and McAdams did get singled out for Oscar nominations, it feels like a true ensemble piece, with the subject being the star of the show.
On a technical level, Spotlight is the kind of film that works just as well on the small screen. There is virtually zero visual spectacle or clever filmmaking tricks to behold that require a big screen viewing, and that’s okay. There is a recurring piano score and mindful cinematography, but there is nothing else to distract you from the task at hand. This allows the viewer to be drawn into the story and compels them to genuinely root for this group of smart, competent journalists.
Will Spotlight Stand the Test of Time?
Despite being set in the very specific time period of the early 2000s, Spotlight has the potential to remain relevant for many generations to come. It is especially relevant now, in an age where the President of the United States and his officials are crying “fake news,” citing alternative facts, and denouncing media as a whole. I will be the first to admit that the world of journalism has its bad apples, but society needs reporters to inform us on what’s going on in our cities, our country, and the world at large. Spotlight ends on the reporters fielding calls from other victims after the big story has been published, and what better image is there of the importance of investigative journalism?
Another factor that should preserve Spotlight‘s immortality is its lack of directorial flare. While some may criticize director Tom McCarthy’s absence of visual style, if anything this will help future generations appreciate the film on a bare bones level without being distracted by dated effects or cheap tricks. I feel confident that Spotlight, like All the President’s Men before it, will serve as a potent reminder of the power and importance in speaking truth to power and have a fruitful stay in the film canon.
To watch Spotlight for yourself, it is available to rent or buy on Amazon, and DVD and Blu-ray through the following links: