The best film won: 5 ways Spotlight beat the Oscars odds
Tom McCarthy’s film may have broken a few cardinal rules but still took two Academy Awards, including best picture
Spotlight , Tom McCarthy’s drama about the Boston Globe’s 2001-2002 investigation of child sexual abuse within the Catholic church, became an Oscar favourite the moment it made its European and North American debuts in Venice, Telluride and Toronto last year.
READ MORE: Spotlight looks at the Catholic Church’s shameful response to child sexual abuse in Boston
The film, starring Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams and Liev Schreiber as reporters and editors involved with the Pulitzer Prize-winning series, possessed all of the markers of a shoo-in for best picture: an all-star cast, an classic aesthetic reminiscent of great ’70s-era thrillers, and a socially important subject.
But like all front-runners, Spotlight started to lose steam with prognosticators late in the race, when challengers like The Revenant , Alejandro González Iñárritu’s visually stunning frontier survival story, and The Big Short , Adam McKay’s jittery, aggressive portrait of the 2008 financial meltdown, began to earn honours at guild and critics’ awards.
When The Revenant wound up earning three Academy Awards – including Leonardo DiCaprio’s first Oscar, Inarritu’s best-directing Oscar (his second in a row) and Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography award (his third in a row) – it felt like Spotlight might have peaked too soon. But, after winning the evening’s first award for best original screenplay, it wound up winning best picture, as some observers (including this one) maintained it would all along.
READ ALSO: ‘Spotlight’ is best picture and DiCaprio finally gets an Oscar, but diversity drama takes centre stage
Herewith, the arguments against Spotlight’s best picture chances that were overheard during awards season, and the reasons they were wrong: