Top Five Highlights of the 2015-16 Oscar Season

Twelve days removed from the Oscars, and I'm more than ready to leave it in the rear view. The overall season felt a bit fatiguing and lacklustre this year, which I can owe that to my own pessimistic misreading of the Best Picture race. But the big night itself had a few positively thrilling outcomes, and the preceding months were not completely without their pleasures. Herewith are my top 5 highlights.

5. Leo's Red Carpet Rampage and other fun stuff
Leo winning what many would call his overdue Oscar for such an uninteresting performance (Hoo-Ah!) would normally bother me a lot more, but a couple of things allowed me to enjoy it. A) I don't weep for his competition. B) There was just so much glee to be had on the Internet! The Red Carpet Rampage video game is an obvious highlight, but there were plenty of other good guffaws.

@ladygaga verdade pic.twitter.com/mvmi2RJFb6

— luscas (@luscas) February 28, 2016

Oscar Telecast Retrospective Part 3: The Big Shock, and Failing Gags

Let's set the stage: Mad Max had just gone six for seven in the crafts, and Andy Serkis arrives to announce the outcome of its 8th nomination, Best Visual Effects.

First of all, having Serkis presenting this category is kinda inspired (though not as inspired as giving him an actual Oscar nomination would be), but I take umbrage with his introductory clip reel featuring only two of his various performance-capture characters he's played, Gollum and Caesar. Where's King Kong? Captain Haddock? Jeez, even Supreme Ruler Snoke? Talk about a diversity problem!

But I barely had time to tweet my nagging quibble, because moments later the collective jaw of Oscar watchers hit the floor when he announced Ex Machina as the winner. I was so gobsmacked that I didn't even realize the orchestra was playing “Get Down Saturday Night” from Oscar Isaac's much gif'ed sexy dance interlude from the film. Too much fun!

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:

One Category at a Time: Visual Effects

Every since 1971, the rule has held that no Best Picture nominated film has lost Best Visual Effects to a film not also nominated for Best Picture. It certainly buttresses the belief that Academy members simply vote for the movie they like in categories they don't really understand, and visual effects is arguably the most "technical" of the so-called "technical" awards (I always find that term so vulgar).

But if ever that rule was to be broken, this would be the year.

My Award Nominations: Visual Effects

There's so much swell work out there this year. Not only are the Visual Effects in these five movies extremely proficient, but what I love most about them is that they have personality. It's easy to take photoreal illusions for granted these days, so it bears reminding that thy are created by artists who truly are thinking about deeper things than "How real does it look?". Watch some of the embedded featurettes to see what I mean.

Alejandro G. Innaritu wins DGA for second straight year

When was the last time we had a season as disparate and fractured as this one?

The Big Short wins the PGA, Spotlight takes the SAG, and then last night
The Revenant's Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu swiped the Directors Guild of America's top prize for the second consecutive year. It seems as though we've arrived at the point where all bets are off for Predicting the Best Picture Oscar. Which of these three will prevail?

My Award Nominations: Supporting Actress

Another busy Saturday in awards land. The Annie awards will name their top achievements in animation (are we expecting anything other than Inside Out?), while the DGA may provide us with our strongest clue as to who's really leading this year's opaque Best Director race. If anyone other than Adam McKay wins, will we see a split on Oscar night? If it's George Miller, do we really think he can turn the same trick with AMPAS? Not to jinx it or anything, but that would be the single coolest Oscar win I've ever seen... Too cool to actually happen, I'm sure.

As for me, I'll be taking care of my acting categories this weekend. Let's get the ball rolling with Best Supporting Actress, which hasn't been this competitive in years (and that's without fraudulent leading ladies posing as supporting players).

My Award Nominations: Production Design

This weekend I'm tackling the design categories and cinematography, and as always there's an excellent variety of work that spoils us for choice. Behold my picks for the Best Production Design of the year.

One Category at a Time: Original Screenplay

With only a handful of weeks before the Oscars, now is the time for me to start formulating some predictions, and I'll start with what may be the surest lock of the year, Best Original Screenplay.

It's hard to imagine the prize going to anything but the former Best Picture frontrunner Spotlight. Though it's no longer favoured to win the top award after The Big Short's momentum shifting PGA win, Tom McCarthy and Josh Singer's dense journalistic procedural will surely be given its due here.

The nearest challenger -- a distant second despite being a perfectly respectable option -- is probably Matt Charman and the Coens' austere political quasi-thriller Bridge of Spies, being the only other Best Picture nominee in the field.

Last minute FYCs, and thoughts on H8teful, Saul

Oscar nomination balloting closes this Friday, and even in a season as scattered as this, it feels like some highly deserving contenders are still getting the short end of the stick. Dig deep, Academy! Lack of consensus is only exciting if you get imaginative instead of voting in default mode. You could do a lot worse than giving this handful of long shots a good hard look:

Creed for Best Picture

I was actually saving this FYC for Sicario, but after a strong guild showing thus far, I figure I should send my wishes to a more needy but equally deserving contender. This is one of the most satisfying mainstream entertainments of the year, and for it to have been overlooked by the Globes, BFCA, and PGA (where I had harboured hope for it) is disappointing to say the least. But it's not too late for the Academy to do right!

Catching up with Bond, Shaun, and Ava

If distributors are going to playing coy all November long with their hottest Oscar prospects, I'm going to play catch-up during the lull.

Back in the Spring, Alex Garland's dulcet sci-fi Ex Machina was making the rounds on the arthouse circuit, earning strong notices for its heady ruminations on consciousness and artificial intelligence, and especially for Alicia Vikander's enigmatic robotic performance.

It's a thoughtful, chilling, lingering chamber piece -- and what perfectly designed, minimalist chambers they are too -- that takes a refreshingly intimate approach to subject matter that would tempt most filmmakers to go big. We already knew Garland had a penchant for subtle speculative fiction based on his adapted screenplay of Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go from 2010, and his authorial voice remains intact in this directorial debut.