Oscars Post-Mortem: The Winners

The movies have been gilded and I've had my say – in concentrated tweets of rage or elation, at least. But now with the clearer eyes of a 4-hours night's sleep, I can start poring over the minutia of the now expired Oscar season.

I'll begin my post-mortem purge with a basic rundown of the winners, uncoloured by my yo-yo-ing feelings on the show itself (more on that in time). I need to allow the heat of the moment to subside before truly evaluating my thoughts on who was victorious and who should have been.

On the whole, I'd have to call it a fairly satisfying night, though not from a predictive standpoint. I was steeling myself for a face-plant this year, and with so much divergence among the major guilds, you could hardly blame my uncertainty. It bore itself out with a rather dismal 16/24; My poorest showing since 2011.

But I can hardly complain about such poor fortune when it's delivered in the form of Spotlight's nail-biting triumph in Best Picture, its refinement and intelligence ultimately besting the ostentatious hollowness of The Revenant and the misjudged gimmickry of The Big Short. For much of the season (ever since the PGA) I had never felt so disengaged in the outcome of the Academy's top category, but now I can't recall ever being this excited by it.

Top 20 of 2015, Part 1 (#20-11)

Even when you see well under a hundred movies a year, listing a mere top ten can still be awfully limiting. So this year I'm making time to lavish praise on twenty, which I should have started doing a long time ago. And even with twice as much love going around, there still isn't room to fit in every noteworthy achievement of 2015, so first a few shout-outs:

To Matthew Heineman's gripping expose on vigilantes fighting a hopeless war in Cartel Land; To Deniz Gamze Ergüven for evoking the sisterly bonds of Mustang with such purity and sensitivity; To Steven Spielberg's sturdy, classical construction of the Cold War pseudo-thriller Bridge of Spies; And to J.J. Abrams for reawakening our love of the galaxy far, far away in his exciting and affectionate Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

And now, the first half of my Top 20 Movies of 2015:

My Award Nominations: Documentary

Documentary filmmaking continues to thrive in the digital age, in which tools and broadcast platforms have never been more accessible to storytellers and audiences alike. I don't envy the doc branch of the Academy, who are forced to screen growing numbers of submissions every year. If, like me, you've only got time for a few, you could do a lot worse than these five:

My Award Nominations: Editing

My roster of personal nominees continues growing this weekend with the visual post-production categories and music.

It's one of those years when I wish I could include about seven or eight nominees for Best Editing. It pained me to make some of these cuts (heehee), but I like the final five I've wound up with:

One Category at a Time: Documentary

The documentary branch of the Academy sure does like its music docs. They've nominated four of 'em in as many years, and the overall voting membership doesn't seem to be tired of them; Two of the last three champs in this category presented stories about musical artists, and all signs point to this year's winner continuing the trend.

ACE winners and SAG Predix [UPDATE: Winners]

It's a busy weekend of guild activity. The American Cinema Editors handed out hardware last night to all the usual suspects: Amy and Inside Out received their due in the ghettoized doc and animation categories (but seriously, the editing in those two are good enough to be up for the Oscar), while the current fruntrunners for the Academy's editing prize, The Big Short and Mad Max: Fury Road, got to split the top honours due to comedy/drama distinctions. I'm leaning the way of The Big Short coming out on top in the end, but a BAFTA win for Mad Max may yet give me hope.

Both of those are also in the hunt for awards from the Screen Actors Guild tonight. Mad Max is sure to take the prize for Best Stunt Ensemble, but The Big Short has its eyes set on the more significant Best Ensemble category. If Spotlight is going to make a push back in the latter half of phase two, it must start here. If it loses, however, then it truly is a runaway train.

Three of the four individual acting categories feel locked into place, but for Best Supporting Actor due to the absence of presumed frontrunner Sylvester Stallone. If Mark Rylance or Christian Bale (the only SAG contenders nominated for the Oscar) win, then I think this is still a race to the finish.

My guesses:
Best Stunt Ensemble: Mad Max [WINNER: Mad Max] Because d'uh.
Best Supporting Actor: Christian Bale [WINNER: Idris Elba] So this ends up not affecting the Oscar race for the moment. Only the forthcoming BAFTA ceremony can shed any light on who Sly's greatest challenger really is.
Best Supporting Actress: Alicia Vikander [WINNER: Alicia Vikander] Category fraud lives.
Best Leading Actor: Leonardo DiCaprio [WINNER: Leonardo DiCaprio] Cannot be stopped.
Best Leading Actress: Brie Larson [WINNER: Brie Larson] But will the Brits prefer her to Irish darling Saoirse Ronan?
Best Ensemble: The Big Short [WINNER: Spotlight] Thank God! This is enough to at least keep the Best Picture race interesting for another week. And even if this proves to be the only major prize that Spotlight claims over The Big Short, it's certainly the most satisfying and deserved prize to win.

Con Job: 'The Big Short' stuns as PGA winner

Well fuck.

The only fraud bigger than the one Wall Street perpetrated against the American public prior to the 2008 housing crisis, is the one The Big Short -- which "smartly" depicts that shameful recent chapter of history -- is pulling over on Hollywood as we speak.

And yet there it stands, as our new Best Picture frontrunner by "virtue" of having won the Producers Guild of America's top prize late last night in Los Angeles. Anyone who claims to have seen this coming is being a revisionist historian. Under no circumstance did this film -- as abrasive, impenetrable and, at its worst, condescending a comedy as you'll likely see -- have the qualities of a consensus pick. It's victory here, and its now inevitable victory at the Oscars, will baffle me for years to come.

Spotlight Shines Bright, but Oscar Frontrunner?

After stirring up a lot of talk at Telluride and TIFF in September, most markets finally got to set eyes on Tom McCarthy's Spotlight. Gripe as I may about sluggish release schedules, this one was worth the wait.

The journalistic docudrama about the Boston Globe's Pulitzer-winning investigation of pedophilia, corruption and complicity within the Catholic Church is dense, and in the best way. McCarthy and co-writer Josh Singer's screenplay packs a lot of content into a swift, focused procedural. It requires attention, and rewards attention.

Granted, talking heads aren't always easy to make jump off the screen, but the cast is greater than the sum of their considerable parts. This is marvelous group acting, with each performer carving out distinctive personalities for a roster of characters who could have become homogenized. The SAG Ensemble prize may be sewn up, and if pundits are to be believed, perhaps the Best Picture Oscar?...

I'm not so sure.

First Week of November Gives Award Watchers Some Breathing Room

The first week of November was like being in the eye of the awards movie hurricane. With no prestige courters daring to go wide on a weekend when they'd be competing with Halloween parties and horror movie marathons, awards watchers had a chance to catch up with any October mainstays they had missed, but this Oscar blogger struck out in search of a title that's still platforming.

After winning the coveted People's Choice Awards at the Toronto International Film Festival, Lenny Abrahamson's Room instantly shot onto pundits' radar as a legit Best Picture contender. Now finally playing on a single commercial screen in Toronto (the city where it was shot in its entirety), I eagerly ventured downtown last weekend to see what all the fuss was about.