Another year, another reminder that white people love giving themselves awards. Nice work, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences! You’ve somehow decided that while neither writer/director Ryan Coogler nor star Michael B. Jordan deserve a nod for Creed, Sylvester Stallone does.
But it’s old news how old and white and male the Academy is—just as it’s predictable that with this year’s nominees, the people behind Hollywood’s biggest annual marketing campaign have, yet again, been suckered by the most Oscar-baity movies and performances. (Hi, Eddie Redmayne!)
There are a few nice surprises, sure—like the slate of cinematography nominees, which is pretty goddamn bulletproof, and seeing Ennio Morricone getting nominated for his Hateful Eight score. But there are just as many nonsensical ones—like Straight Outta Compton getting nominated for its CliffsNotes-y script, or Sam Smith’s garbage fire of a 007 theme getting acknowledged as anything other than a crime against humanity. *JAZZ HANDS* Oscars!
Naturally, the Mercury reviewed all the films that were nominated for Best Picture. Here’s what we thought—feel free to click on the films’ titles to read our full reviews, and feel free to tell us how wrong you think we were. Feel even more free to commiserate with us that this list isn’t just Magic Mike XXL listed eight times.
There’s nothing subtle about The Big Short. Director Adam McKay (Anchorman) uses every trick in the Martin Scorsese handbook—freeze-frame, montage, fourth-wall-breaking narration—to tell the true story of a few investors who predicted the catastrophic financial crisis of 2008. Christian Bale, not exactly a low-key performer to begin with, is given Asperger’s, a stutter, and a glass eye; Steve Carell’s grieving money manager can’t help but speak his mind; and Ryan Gosling is apparently the biggest sleaze in finance—an industry already oozing sleaze out of its finely tailored seams. These guys, among others, foresaw the burst of the housing bubble and invested against it—hoping to profit on Wall Street’s unrepentant greed. NED LANNAMANN
The farther he moves away from temples of doom, altered suburbs, and shooting stars, the easier it is to somehow underestimate Steven Spielberg. (Yes, yes, Crystal Skull, I know.) Even at his most earthbound, though, the filmmaker’s basic chops still reside somewhere in the realm of the freakily supernatural. When he’s cooking, there’s nobody else who can do quite what he does. ANDREW WRIGHT
Brooklyn is shamelessly caught up in its beautiful period details, but… it contains none of that throwback’s signature cynicism. This is a good thing, because it means it’s closer in tone to a James Salter novel than a bleak backward glance: Everything is jewel-toned, beauty is abundant, romance is everywhere, and though there’s a low-level underlying melancholy, it’s of a hardy, everyday variety. If you’re looking for scenery-chewing melodrama, you won’t find it here. MEGAN BURBANK
That’s what the best movies are: stories that can’t be told any other way. And, coming three decades after his last Mad Max, Fury Road is one of Miller’s best—a full-bore, balls-out maelstrom that finds Max Rockatansky (Tom Hardy) once again stumbling around in the post-apocalypse, where he teams up with Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) and tries to survive a days-long car chase from warlord Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne). They race and punch and explode through a lurid, eye-searing palette of oranges and blues; what results is a brutal, beautiful, two-hour action overdose that’s injected with a surprising, if welcome, feminist bent. ERIK HENRIKSEN
Set in a fantastical near-future in which America adequately funds its space program, The Martian is the best ad for NASA since Ahmed Mohamed’s T-shirt. Just about every frame reinforces a core sentiment: It’s time to start caring about space again. The fact that The Martian manages to sell this idea—convincingly and rousingly, with a fair amount of humor—is all the more impressive given that it follows a man who’s been marooned 140 million miles away and is forced to spend his days desperately trying to delay his all-but-inevitable death. It’s funnier than it sounds. ERIK HENRIKSEN
Naturally, [director Alejandro González] Iñárritu goes nuts shooting this thing, capturing with gusto everything from Glass’ lonely sojourns to frantic, brutal attacks by Native Americans. Like Birdman, The Revenant is technically astonishing, with impossibly long takes and long segments of purely visual storytelling—sequences that, at times, feel too clever for their own good. As with Birdman, the audience isn’t ever allowed to forget they’re watching a movie. Iñárritu is too interested in showing off, in using Glass’ story to deliver whiz-bang set piece after whiz-bang set piece. ERIK HENRIKSEN
Room:
Room is about a boy who is born in the garden shed where his mother, “Ma” (Brie Larson), has been kept captive for seven years, ever since she was abducted at age 17. Five-year-old Jack (Jacob Tremblay) has never seen the world outside of the shed—he doesn’t even know such a world exists—and when Ma decides Jack is finally old enough to help carry out an escape attempt, the plan she concocts is dangerous and thrilling. But there’s much more to this story: Room is based on the 2010 novel of the same name by Irish Canadian author Emma Donoghue. I read the book in one sitting—in a paroxysm of anxiety and emotional investment that kept me awake until 3 am—and came away impressed by its thoughtful, unexpected treatment of incredibly disturbing subject matter. The film succeeds by the same token. ALISON HALLETT
Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, and Brian d’Arcy James play the Globe‘s “spotlight” team of investigative journalists who work on long-term stories while feeling corporate pressure to slow the paper’s shrinking subscription base. But when tasked by their new editor (Liev Schreiber) to look into child molestation charges leveled at Boston’s beloved Catholic Archdiocese, the team discovers the death of print media is the least of their worries. Translating a highly detailed true story to film could sound like a staged reading of a Wikipedia page, or worse, trivialize the victims’ experiences—and Spotlight walks dangerously close to this precipice. However, other than a few hammy moments, this film somehow manages to pull it off. WM. STEVEN HUMPHREY
