As a print journalist, I'm obsessively giddy with excitement as I talk about a film that celebrates Pulitzer-level print journalism. Tom McCarthy's Spotlight deserved every bit of the Oscar it won in the best picture category. The movie, which is about a bunch of investigative journalists at the Boston Globe in 2002 who unearthed a series of child abuse cases that involved numerous Roman Catholic priests, is assuringly brilliant.
The title refers to an investigative team dedicated to long-form incisive reporting in Boston. Headed by Walter Robinson (the amazing Michael Keaton), the team consists of Rachel McAdams, Mark Ruffalo and Brian d'Arcy James. McCarthy nails the atmospherics of post-9/11 American journalism, the steady advent of the internet into the newsroom and the crumpled costumes of the reporters. The sequence in which Keaton's team pieces together the scandal with a series of meetings with sources is like watching Michael Jackson unveil his moonwalk for the first time.
Yes, the movie does get a tad preachy towards the end, but Spotlight is a great newspaper movie. It's easily the best thing I have watched on print journalism after The Wire (season five). Aaron Sorkin's overtly righteous TV show, Newsroom, was missing the moments of levity that Spotlight has. For example, the scene in which McAdams meets an accused priest and he's more than welcoming about the details is simultaneously fraught, disturbing and unsettlingly brilliant.
In a world where listicles, think pieces and Google news trends are ruling the roost in the newsroom, this Oscar is a sobering reminder that solid ground reporting is becoming nearly extinct. Newspapers are shutting down like there's no tomorrow, and the rest focus on digital readership. That might not be a bad thing as long as there are editors who believe journalism exists for public good and not for disseminating celebrity news by the minute - such as Liev Schreiber's character in Spotlight. For now, let's revel in the fact that Spotlight is the first movie about journalism to win the "best picture" Oscar since 1947, when Gentleman's Agreement got the honour.
Although I do have reservations about whether Spotlight deserved the Oscar, I'm glad that at least The Revenant did not win the top award. This bloated mess of a movie, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, left me mostly untouched throughout the 150 minutes for which it ran. In 1823, Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) finds himself mauled by a bear and is left to fend for himself. The movie scores high on technical virtuosity. Emmanuel Lubezki's camerawork deserved the Oscar. Ryuichi Sakamoto's stunning music score is another high point of the movie. And Iñárritu masks his nihilism behind such technical brilliance and puts together an assembly-line movie that will never make you empathise with the lead character.
The Washington Post's Ann Hornaday said The Revenant is "essentially a fetish film ... set up as an endurance test, designed to elicit awe at the physical extremes it took to film them. It also presents an implicit dare to audiences inured to seeing bodies in pain". She added: "The Revenant encourages us to sit back and be dazzled, while Spotlight calls on each viewer's memory, conscience and moral imagination to complete the picture and create its deepest meaning."
Anyway, let's congratulate Iñárritu for being the first director to win two back-to-back Oscars since Joseph L Mankiewicz for A Letter to Three Wives and All About Eve in 1949-50. I can't get over the snubs, though. With six Oscars, Mad Max: Fury Road ties with Star Wars for the most wins by a film that won neither the best director award nor one for the best picture. They awarded every technical achievement to a film whose leader (George Miller) wasn't rewarded for putting it together and I wonder which part of the world it makes sense at.
At least we had the gorgeous opening monologue by Chris Rock that we will cherish for the longest time possible.
