Insofar as it’s possible to get a surprise at the Academy Awards – an event in which outcome-permutations are notoriously reduced almost to zero before anything happens at all – we had one tonight. Spotlight has won best picture: a high-minded, heartfelt and thoroughly absorbing movie about a journalism campaign pursued at the beginning of the last decade by the Boston Globe’s investigative reporting team Spotlight. It exposed child sex abuse by the Catholic church and the way the city’s conservative and clubbable institutions conspired to cover it up and look the other way: and this included the Globe itself.
It was a classic issue movie, in this case about journalists caring about something other than building their personal brand on Twitter. And it reminds everyone working in today’s digital, atomised world of journalism that sometimes only big, old-fashioned newspapers have the collective, institutional weight and clout to go up against wholesale wrongdoing. Perhaps after the #OscarsSoWhite controversy, the Academy has found a way of showing its accusers that it does care about progressive issues. But by next year the Academy will have to find a way to show the world it is a more modern, transparent institution — perhaps by publishing its membership criteria and even the voting breakdown?
The Revenant was such an exciting and sensual piece of work that it seems strange that its victories in this year’s Academy Awards feel like an anticlimax. It picks up best director for Alejandro González Iñárritu (his second in a row after last year’s Birdman), best cinematographer for Emmanuel Lubezki, and of course best actor for Leonardo DiCaprio for his highest-of-high-octane performances as the 19th-century fur trapper Hugh Glass who endures an ordeal of survival and revenge – and an unforgettably grisly encounter with a bear. DiCaprio is, to use an old-fashioned, studio-era phrase, an above-the-title player: a real star. In truth, he made the other nominees look a little dull, although The Revenant was not really about his acting. It was the spectacle, the physical immersive effect. As for DiCaprio, this was his night, although I prefer him in comic roles, such as the ones he played in Django Unchained and The Wolf of Wall Street. But he really embodied the muscular power and fanatical concentration in The Revenant.
Now I have to utter a futile howl of rage and pain on behalf of that wonderful film Carol, directed by Todd Haynes, adapted from the Patricia Highsmith novel by Phyllis Nagy and with sublime performances from Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara. How on earth has this superb movie been so overlooked by the Academy? I now hope that Carol has a kind of One Direction career: snubbed by the awards establishment, it may get an underdog bounce as everyone realises that it is better than most of the films being showered with praise.
As far as the screenplay Oscars go, I applaud the prize going to Spotlight, which cleverly approximated the steady and relentless drumbeat created by effective and consistent investigative journalism. However, at the risk of being churlish, I have to reiterate my scepticism about The Big Short – the winner of best adapted screenplay – a smug, shallow film endlessly congratulating itself on how clever it is and not seriously interested in challenging the status quo. The film simply goes along with the system, and worships the half-dozen or so money guys who found a way of doing well out of the 2008 crash. Ryan Gosling and Steve Carell give awful performances. But Christian Bale was good in it.
In the best supporting actor category, Mark Rylance delivered a technical knockout to Sly Stallone, up for his sentimentally revered revival of Rocky Balboa in Creed. Rylance was a worthy winner. A few years ago, when Christoph Waltz won this Oscar for Inglourious Basterds, he gave a gallant speech noting that everyone else was supporting him. This in its way was true of Rylance, who was (in the nicest possible way) such a scene-stealer in Bridge of Spies that he drew the eye magnetically and made it seem as if everyone else, including the veteran star Tom Hanks, was just there to lend more lustre to this unique performer. As the convicted spy Rudolph Abel in cold war America, Rylance was wily, calm, unreadable, with the deadpan air of a villain – a distant cousin to Anthony Hopkins’s Hannibal Lecter in his imperturbable stillness – and yet on the side of the angels. Or rather: Tom Hanks is on his side. And the fact that his accent is so unlocatable makes his performance even more exotic: a weird blend of English, Scottish and Hollywood Russian.
I have been a partisan for best actress nominee Saoirse Ronan who gave a lovely, ingenuous performance as Éilis, the young Irish girl forced to emigrate and then partially re-immigrate, and therefore contemplating parallel life-choices, in the heartfelt drama Brooklyn. But I have to concede the justice of Brie Larson’s win for Room, in which she plays the mother forced to bring up her infant son in a tiny cell, having been captured by an abuser. It was a challenging role in which Larson really showed what she could do in that film’s remarkably subtle and complex final act.
Alicia Vikander’s win for The Danish Girl in the best supporting actress rewards a performance and a performer with beauty, charisma and guile, although I would have preferred to see her get the prize for Ex Machina, the sci-fi thriller in which she was more interesting as the automaton who may or may not have a mind of her own. Vikander’s success is a conservative if plausible choice, though I feel that Vikander’s best is yet to come, and I think the more powerful turns came from Jennifer Jason Leigh in Tarantino’s incendiary The Hateful Eight and of course Rooney Mara who was so good in Todd Haynes’s Carol.
What a remarkable win for Ennio Morricone, who at 87 years old gets his very first Oscar, for best original score. It is genuinely exciting that this remarkable man is doing vital creative work. His theme for The Hateful Eight was insistently and insidiously catchy, trailing its own disquiet across the landscape, and played its own crucial dramatic role. What a glorious Oscar.
The least surprising win of the evening was for Pete Docter’s Inside Out, which of course best animation: it is a thoroughly decent, overwhelmingly attractive and good-natured film. The fact that it won over Charlie Kaufman’s conceptually stunning stop-motion film Anomalisa is no surprise and though in terms of strict merit Anomalisa should really have won – and in fact should have been nominated for best picture and best work of art and indeed best sex scene – Inside Out has developed an enormous claim on everyone’s loyalty and love. In fact, its win casts an interesting light into how cinema competes with literature. The movies traditionally offer spectacle, drama, action and speech: they offer the thrilling interplay of those externals, while literature can give you direct, unmediated access into consciousness: you can go inside characters’ minds and hearts to discover what they are feeling. But actually, that is exactly what Inside Out is offering. With those five characters, Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger and Disgust, Inside Out gives you a most accessible and unpretentious version of the stream of consciousness.
This year’s best foreign language film has its own claim to be the best film tout court and is one of those occasions where the Academy really has got it right. László Nemes’s Son of Saul is the extraordinary film about Auschwitz in 1944, telling a brutal story the Sonderkommando, the inmates forced to do petty tasks and police the actual business of extermination itself – and imagines one survivor’s discovery of the body of his own son. It is hardly something to compare to Spielberg’s far more conventional Schindler’s List which by comparison pulls punches. But the remarkable Son of Saul is something to compare with Klimov’s Come and See.
Asif Kapadia’s Amy has become in its own unshowy way, an awards-season juggernaut, now effortlessly demolishing the last obstacle in its way: the best documentary Oscar. Perhaps strict justice should have given this to Josh Oppenheimer for his The Look of Silence, effectively the second panel in a masterly film-diptych about the way Indonesia’s ruling classes have perpetrated horrific human rights abuses since the 1960s, and became blandly content with this grisly achievement. But Amy packed an enormous punch: it was a viscerally passionate picture about Amy Winehouse and her music and made the best possible use of its treasure-trove of home video.
Finally: a host of technical wins for Mad Max: Fury Road, including best costume design for Jenny Beavan. It’s great to see a rewards for that terrifically enjoyable film which was not encumbered by looking like a solemn piece of Oscar bait.
