2016 Oscars Picks

Video: Every Best Picture Ever

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Getting excited for tomorrow.

2016 Oscars Best Picture Nominees Power Rankings

Most sports networks publish power rankings once a week covering the major sports leagues. The rankings involve some stats and take into account each team’s win-loss record, but overall the exercise is mostly subjective. The rankings usually reflect which teams seem to be playing the best and worst. The teams are ranked relative to one another. So even if the Heat have a better record, if the Bulls are playing better that week, they’ll be ranked higher than the Heat. The rankings don’t really matter, but it’s a fun way to keep up with the overall picture of the league. With the Oscars this Sunday, it’s time for the inaugural Watching About Movies Oscars Best Picture Nominees Power Rankings (or WAMOBPNPR for short).

Sports power rankings change every week to reflect the changing tides of the league, so as a one-time ranking this will be a kind of artificial power ranking. It would be fun to do a weekly ranking ahead of time, or to rank them as I see them. But given how difficult it is for someone in a small city to see all the nominees (some don’t come to our theatres), I only recently saw the last nominee and we’re left with one preview ranking. Maybe I’ll do a running ranking next year. Also, these aren’t my predictions for the big prize. I’ll post all my predictions soon.

8. The Martian

The Martian puts a man alone on Mars and has him and everyone on Earth try to find a way to get him off it. Matt Damon is supremely likeable and charming and his performance is the easy-going, fun-loving antidote to Leonardo DiCaprio’s (the two are both nominated for best actor). The movie shares Damon’s high-spiritedness and celebrates scientific ingenuity, while avoiding Hollywood clichés like the weeping family waiting for their stranded father or emotional breakdowns of self-pity. The Martian is, at its core, about gumption and Damon’s Mark Watney wastes no time when there’s work to be done and problems to solve. He makes jokes and both he and the movie remain upbeat throughout. Everything and everyone is gung-ho.

The film’s breeziness is a nice relief from some overly-serious “Oscar” movies of recent years. But it may also undermine the stakes of the movie. Aside from a fairly thrilling climax, it’s never really in doubt what is going to happen. Some of the characters at NASA are also underdeveloped - Chiwetel Ejiofor mostly huffs and puffs from place to place and Kristen Wiig’s character could be taken out completely. And some of the exposition is obvious and heavy-handed (at one point an astronaut asks another astronaut to repeat their plan again, “but this time in English”). But it is fun, entertaining, and light-hearted. Mark Watney’s explanations to the cameras that surround him manage to never be hokey, thanks mostly to the cool charisma of Matt Damon.

I’m happy to see big-budget blockbuster movies done well get well-deserved awards attention. Not every great movie has to be overly serious or artistic. Along with Mad Max Fury Road, The Martian shows that fun entertainment can be more than earth-sized CGI explosions, obnoxious smashing, superheroes, and giant robots. 

7. Room

It is a credit to the film, filmmakers, and novelist who wrote the book the movie is based on, that with a premise so bleak and depressing the movie is so positive. Room is about a woman (Brie Larson, who will win for best actress) who was abducted as a teenager and confined to a garden shed for seven years, while raising the son she conceived with her abductor. Larson’s character (Ma) weaves a fairy tale for the boy (Jacob Treblay – I can’t even understand how a child can be such a good actor) and he is genuinely thrilled at the meagre contents of Room – not ‘the room’ or ‘our room’, but Room, as it is a character itself in his little world. His joy is heartbreaking. It’s like the game the father makes up for his son in the concentration camp to spare him the horrors in Life is Beautiful. Parental love at its most selfless and desperate. Room is magical from his point of view. It is only in Ma’s tones and expressions that the true hell of the situation is revealed.

Room is a movie of two halves. It’s not a spoiler to say that its action peaks fairly early but it goes on to say important things in its second half. I wish I had known that going in, as the climax of the first half is as thrilling and suspenseful as any scene of any movie this year. When that tension released, I assumed things would wrap up quickly. But there is much more. The second half is as difficult as the first, though in a different way. But it’s where hope eventually heals, and an open door, fresh air, and other people become miracles to be treasured. Room is ultimately a celebration of life. 

6. Brooklyn

Brooklyn tells the story of an Irish immigrant named Eilis (Soairse Ronan, who is excellent) navigating life in Brooklyn, New York in the 1950s. It is a simple story about nice people being nice to each other and doing nice things. That may sound hokey, but the movie’s soft touch works and produces a gentle tension as I hoped nothing bad would ever happen to anybody. It is an extremely empathetic movie. There is conflict, and it is painful, but the niceness doesn’t go away. And like its characters, the movie is wholesome and hopeful.

Brooklyn is ultimately about home. As Eilis’s homesickness is replaced by romance she finds herself torn between two possible homes on opposite sides of the Atlantic, as the one she left becomes more appealing while she’s away. It is a compassionate and human movie, as warm as The Revenant is cold. And in this era of anti-heroes and TV dramas about nasty people trying to out-nasty each other, some genuine warmth and niceness is a welcomed relief.

5. The Big Short

The Big Short joins the list of great movies about things that shouldn’t make for great movies. There was The Social Network, about the history of an internet startup, and Moneyball, about the statistics and analytics revolution in baseball. And now we get two hours of mortgages, interest rates, investments, and the housing market.

The movie tells the story of the 2008 US housing market collapse that caused the worldwide economic crisis, the greedy and crooked bankers behind it, and the few who saw it coming and bet on it. It wants you to leave it shaking your head at the greed, selfishness, excess, and fraud displayed by the bankers and investment managers. Maybe I’m cynical, but I wasn’t surprised to learn that Wall Street bankers were greedy, crooked, and dishonest. But The Big Short is a very angry movie disguised as a comedy, and it allows that anger to well up and seep through the humor, undercutting any cynicism we might feel toward the financial industry.

This anger is most apparent in Steve Carrell’s character, who seems to yell every line (the performance was apparently accurate, as the movie tells us in one of its many breaks of the fourth wall). But his anger is the moral center of the film. His indignation drives the movie and he is one of the few to question whether profiting off betting against the banks is only doing indirectly what the banks did directly. There are no heroes as the lower classes and the vulnerable foot the bill either way.

The film is very self-aware – maybe too self-aware at times (its hip references and documentary-style clips and cutaways are more distracting than useful) – and it knows we don’t know or care about the details behind housing bonds and Wall Street investing. But it uses celebrity cameos to explain it all in helpful metaphors that make it all interesting and, at times, even exciting. And in explaining it all, the movie exposes the apathy that prevents all but a few people of looking closely enough to prevent such greed-driven disasters. 

4. The Revenant

A critic was publicly shamed for commenting after an early screening that this movie is not for women. That’s neither a good thing to say nor accurate – there were many women in the theatre when I saw it opening night and Ashley wants to see it. But the sentiments behind his poorly worded comments have something to them. The film is a two-and-a-half hour ode to frontier-style hyper-masculinity at its best and worst. Vengeance, lawlessness, violence, war, murder, greed, and selfishness all mingle with frontier grit, determination, resilience, dedication, loyalty, and toughness, and it’s all almost too much. It’s an exercise in endurance to get through watching it. It’s dark and brutal, and raw and tough like calloused hands. It is also beautiful.

The cinematography is spectacular and is sure to win Lubezki his unprecedented third Oscar in a row (Gravity two years ago and Birdman last year). The tracking shots in the ambush and fighting scenes, the landscapes shots, the use of only natural light, and the artistic flashbacks all combine to make it a beautiful work of visual art that could stand alone from the rest of its parts. It is a moving painting of the Rocky Mountains – and apparently some stand-in mountains when the Rockies wouldn’t cooperate with filming. The mountains stand behind every scene, watching the violence and brutality like a disapproving parent, seemingly sending down the cold as punishment.

As he crawls through the icy hell, most of DiCaprio’s dialogue has to crawl through his slashed larynx, so he spends more time making sounds of agony than words. He is still excellent (and will probably get his Oscar), though he may have been upstaged by Tom Hardy’s performance, which is haunting and as chilling as the frozen landscape (and should get him an Oscar too). Everything about this movie is cold – even all the blood. I felt like I needed a warm bath after watching it. 

3. Bridge of Spies

I might be biased on this one, as Bridge of Spies involves many things I’m a sucker for: Spielberg, Tom Hanks, lawyers and law stuff, political intrigue, espionage, the 1950s, Cold War paranoia, mystery and suspense. It’s old-fashioned, straight-forward entertainment expertly done. Hanks is reliable as ever as James Donovan, a lawyer chosen to represent accused Russian spy Rudolf Abel and later negotiate a prisoner swap involving Abel and a shot-down US spy captured in the USSR. Donovan is given the job to show the Russians the fairness and nobility of American justice. But it becomes clear that everyone involved except Donovan is interested only in the show. When he pursues the case beyond the initial trial – for legitimate constitutional and rule of law reasons (even in the trailer Hanks’ soothing, fatherly voice reminds us that “every person matters”) – that the cold war paranoia really rears its ugly head.

As the case moves through the system, and as Donovan moves through East Berlin, at some point his motivation seems to change from belief in justice and the rule of law to friendship and admiration – even in the face of paranoid pressures all around him. The bond between the two men is strong and drives the movie – even the second half, from which Rudolf (played by Mark Rylance, who is great and might win the Oscar) is mostly absent. Both men remain steadfastly committed to their causes. And however opposite those causes may seem, they share a quiet dedication to honest justice and integrity that transcends international suspicions. 

In large part because of Hanks, Bridge of Spies finds warmth and decency in the Cold War courtrooms and frozen streets of Berlin. It is an uplifting study of justice and old-fashioned moral principles. 

2. Spotlight

We saw this at a weeknight late showing. It’s a movie I didn’t expect to be playing in a small city and we watched it alone with a single man and empty seats and a vague panic that maybe we weren’t supposed to be there. It was the night before the new Star Wars arrived and it was as though the air and the patrons had been sucked out in advance of the approaching storm. When the movie ended the lights were off in the hallway and at the concession and there was no staff and we worried the doors might be locked. But we escaped having seen one of the best movies of the year.

Spotlight tells the story of a team of investigative journalists from the Boston Globe uncovering the child sexual molestation scandal in the local Catholic Church. The movie itself is a form of journalism as it tells the story in a new medium to a new audience who likely didn’t know all the details of the story when it was published. It’s journalism about journalism, but it’s not self-congratulatory as you might expect such a production to be. The film handles the topic brilliantly and sensitively, portraying few heroes in a story full of only heartbreak and sadness. It balances celebrating the great work of the journalists with the tragic fact that their story could have been published much earlier.

The movie has been criticized for not being very cinematic – it’s been called a great TV movie. But I think seeing it that way misses the point. To me it’s a type of journalism at its finest about journalism at its finest. It is well-crafted, understated, and full of great performances. It tells an important story in an important way and I hope it reaches more people than just me, Ashley, and our friend the stranger in the dark.

 1. Mad Max Fury Road

I appreciated the originals for what they were, but what they were was not something I enjoyed. So when Fury Road was coming I was planning on staying away. A bunch of weirdos swinging on poles and blowing things up in the desert? No thanks. But a friend dragged me to it and I’ll always be glad he did.

There have been a few movie-going experiences in my life that stand out above the others. Seeing Jurassic Park was one. Titanic was another (for other reasons – thanks to Kate Winslet and pre-puberty … and the movie was great). I have clear memories of seeing some Disney movies and some Batman movies. In recent years it was Gravity, which was a spectacle of cinematic technology at the peak of its powers (I actually ducked in the theatre, like an idiot, to avoid the 3D space debris). Fury Road joined the list of unforgettable theatre experiences.

A good movie makes me forget I’m watching a movie. It pulls me in and I don’t notice I’m looking at a screen or sitting among strangers or that I’m hot or cold or uncomfortable or happy or sad. The story just seems to happen inside of me – the movie puts itself someplace behind my eyes. It doesn’t become reality, but it seems as though there is nothing else. But even a great movie releases its hold frequently. I snap out of it and look around the room or adjust my position or think of other things. Sometimes I get sucked back in, sometimes I don’t – I can still follow and enjoy a movie without being sucked in. But Fury Road sucked me in for the longest time any movie has ever sucked me in. I think the movie was half over before I realized I had been sitting clenched and stiff like a corpse, leaning forward in my seat with my eyes wide for over an hour. It sounds cheesy, but I was genuinely thrilled.

It’s wild, over-the-top, outrageous, and fun and it doesn’t try to be much more than that. But it’s grounded in its own reality (much has been made of its practical effects and lack of CGI) and its tough female characters are important and a welcomed sight. It’s one of the best action movies of all time, one of the best times I’ve had at a movie theatre, and my favorite movie of 2015.