The Revenant, Spotlight, The Big Short front runners for Oscar for best picture

Three films seen as most likely to snare the top prize, though Birdman winning last year may count against The Revenant, while Leonardo DiCaprio, Brie Larson, Sylvester Stallone and Alicia Vikander look best placed to win acting Oscars

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Leonardo DiCaprio’s performance in The Revenant, as a frontiersman left for dead in the wilderness after a bear attack, has garnered critical acclaim.

Published: 1:28pm, 2 Feb 2016Updated: 1:28pm, 2 Feb 2016

Once again, it looks to be a three-way race for the best picture Oscar.

Spotlight won the Screen Actors Guild Awards’ film ensemble honour at the weekend. A week earlier, The Big Short took the Producers Guild’s best picture prize.

A few days from now, when the Directors Guild of America hands out its awards, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu is a favourite to win for his work on The Revenant .

A still from Spotlight, the based-on-true-story drama centring on the team of Boston Globe journalists who unravelled the widespread cover-up of child sex abuse by Catholic priests in 2002.

The last time three movies divided and conquered the guilds along these lines? Just two years ago when 12 Years a Slave, Gravity and American Hustle jostled in a wide-open best picture race that came down to the wire before 12 Years ultimately prevailed when the final envelope was opened.

Issues of racial diversity have dominated the headlines since the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences failed to nominate any people of colour for its 20 acting nominations for a second consecutive year. The controversy has partially obscured a tight contest for the academy’s top prize, a race that the studio backers of three movies – The Revenant, The Big Short and Spotlight – genuinely believe they will win.

Steve Carell and Ryan Gosling star in The Big Short, a drama-comedy about the financial crisis of 2008.

The Spotlight team found new potency with its SAG Awards cast honour, even though the movie winning that award has gone on to take the best picture Oscar just 10 of 20 times over the years. So that’s a coin flip, but it’s better than nothing. And if The Big Short had parlayed its PGA win with an SAG trophy, right now we’d be writing an obituary for Tom McCarthy’s sturdy journalism drama.