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 4: Home Stretch

With six categories still to go the time crunch was clearly being felt by the producers, as they sped through the two music categories and onto the final four.

This is where I sounded my loudest cheer and my most prolonged groan of the night, in rapid succession.

Firstly, despite the fact that it was largely foreseeable for weeks in advance, hearing Quincey Jones announce Ennio Morricone (followed by “My brother, congratulino!”) was a tremendous thrill, as was watching him embrace fellow legend John Williams while the house rose to its feet. Bar none, the most special moment of the night.

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.

March is for postmortems

My usual week of Oscar night cataloging will have to stretch out into more of a post-mortem month.

We'll start by examining the winners as soon as possible (within the week). Lots to discuss here. Some good, some bad, and one bona fide craft category shocker that I still can't wrap my head around. But for the moment, let me just keep a positive footing by saying I can't remember the last time I was this excited about the outcome of Best Picture.

The right choice.

One Category at a Time: Best Picture

Usually by this point in the season, we've had enough indicators lining up behind one title to make calling Best Picture a mere formality on our Oscar night scorecards. The only instance in the last ten years that caused any confusion was two years ago, when the PGA ended in an unprecedented tie. The Producers Guild may not have split hairs this year, but they may as well have, because the rest of the industry has been so uniformly divided among the top three contenders that this may be an even tighter race than the famous Gravity/Slave sprint.

For starters, we can pare down the field of eight nominees. Figuring where they'd rank is an exercise in pure, unfounded speculation. But it's also kinda fun, so humour me.

Top 20 of 2015 continued (Top Ten)

And so I arrive at that time of year when I have to suck it up and commit to a top ten, although it's been a bit harder in the past than it was this year. That's not to comment on the relative quality of the class of 2015 to any other year. I think it was a very fine year indeed, just one with less position shifting than usual. Subsequent viewings of certain titles merely galvanized their place on this list, with little depreciation (or significant appreciation) in value. We'll see if the years allow any of them to rise to the top.

The only oscillating I ended up doing came down to my top two. Imperfect, arguable masterpieces both -- you could also say the same of #3 and #4 -- who each sat in my #1 spot for lengthy stretches throughout the year; A testament to their staying power. At the end of the day, I had to go with the one that moved me most at first blush. Even once multiple revisitations have softened its novelty, that intense initial response is a hard feeling to forget.

But all ten of these deserve gold stars. They have given voice to the voiceless, kept us on the edge of our seats in moments of silence and bombast alike, horrified us with brutal truths, and made human emotion beautifully tangible. Without further ado, my Top Ten Movies of 2015:

One Category at a Time: Director

In the Academy's 88 years, only a couple of filmmakers have won back-to-back Best Director Oscars; John Ford in the 40s and Joseph L. Mankiewicz in the 50s. Since then... Not even close. But that all looks to change this year.

One Category at a Time: Supporting Actor

In most instances, the foundation of support behind Best Picture nominated films is a considerable factor in predicting Oscar winners in other categories. And in some instances, a completely different narrative takes hold that makes such things irrelevant. We may be seeing that this year in Best Supporting Actor, which houses four performances from Best Picture nominees, yet the frontrunner represents his movie's sole nomination.

'Spotlight' and 'Big Short' win WGA Awards

Not much more to comment on in these races. The screenplay categories are probably the biggest locks of the night. The documentary prize featured none of this year's Oscar nominees, which was good news for Alex Gibney's Scientology doc Going Clear.

One Category at a Time: Supporting Actress

It's hard out here for a Supporting Actress. For a true supporting actress, anyway. Worthy would-be contenders like Elizabeth Banks, Julie Walters, Sarah Paulson, Tessa Thompson, Joan Allen and several others had to move aside for the campaign train of wicked uncle Harv, as The Weinstein Co. and Focus Features collectively managed to shoehorn not one, but two leading performances into this year's contest.

And as an extra dash of salt to the proverbial wound, two of the three legit supporting ladies are in here for performances that are a far cry from awards-worthy (Okay, that's subject to taste, but that's why it's an independently owned blog, people!). Lest my pessimism over the category turn too many readers away, why don't we start with the positives:

My Award Nominations: Acting Ensemble

I've sounded off on my favourite individual performances, so we'll cap the weekend off with the Ensembles that most impressed me in 2015. Happy Superbowl Sunday!

My Award Nominations: Supporting Actor

There was a lot more to choose from in the supporting ranks than among the leading men this year. I could list my top twenty picks and still not have mentioned everyone worth mentioning. My picks for Best Supporting Actor:

One Category at a Time: Editing

It used to be you could always count in the ACE winner to guide your prediction for Best Film Editing, but in the four years since The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo stunned on Oscar night, this has become the hardest craft category to gauge. Sometimes they go with the Best Picture winner, sometimes the presumed Best Picture runner-up, sometimes something whose editing is just more conspicuous.

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.

PGA Preview + My Award Nominations: Original Screenplay

Tonight all eyes will be on the Producers Guild of America, who have matched the Academy all six years of the expanded Best Picture era so far. Pundit logic suggests that Spotlight (my prediction) is the only movie that can survive the rigors of the preferential ballot, although I wouldn't put it past them to be sufficiently impressed by the gargantuan production that was The Revenant. Spotlight is a relatively small and very talkative movie after all; Not the type that usually wins Best Picture, but I'll try to remain optimistic.

While the producers' decision may ultimately end the perceived race for the Academy's highest honour, the race for my own awards is just getting started. Each weekend from now until the Oscars I'll be publishing my own list of personal preferences, starting with Best Original Screenplay.

Critics Choice winners

I can't bring myself to live-blog something that's as big a joke as the Critics Choice Awards (a few tweets will suffice), but it's worth remembering that -- like the Academy -- they're a large group with mainstream-leaning tastes. True, that stems mostly from the fact that they actively try to predict the Oscars, but nevertheless the winners they choose can be telling.

Officially, the biggest winner of the night was Mad Max: Fury Road, taking a slew of craft prizes in what the BFCA clearly thinks will be a sweep of those categories on Oscar night. I think the Academy won't be nearly so one-sided, but a number of those awards would be very much deserved, especially the Best Director gong for George Miller.

But it was ultimately Spotlight that walked away with Best Picture. Unsurprising, given this group's prognosticative tendancies, that they would dutifully follow the buzz of the moment. But as we saw last year, the PGA can change that buzz in a heartbeat. Next Saturday will be the acid test.

Here are the winners in the movie categories.

Reacting to the 88th Oscar nominations

Oscar noms are here! Soon we can start the long, tire-spinning process of analyzing the Academy's picks for patterns and trends, reading possible portents into their eventual winners, believing we have it all figured out then talking ourselves out of it, and catching up on all the docs, songs, foreign films, and The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared.

This process takes weeks, and by the time we reach the season's end we become numb to all the prognosticating, and resigned to the apparent winners. That's why I feel it important to document my first impressions for posterity while they're still fresh in my mind.

At first blush, this year's slate comes down to a whole lot of glaring, disappointing omissions that are redeemed by the outstanding haul for Mad Max: Fury Road. I held out far longer than I should have on its Best Picture chances, superstitiously beholden to the belief that the Academy would never be cool enough to spring for this type of in-your-face action extravaganza. Happy to be wrong. Excluding the foreseeable snub of Junkie XL's manic score, AMPAS gave this movie absolutely every nomination it deserved. We should always remember this as a significant triumph over genre bias.

I do find myself, however, progressively more nettled with every passing hour at the dominance of The Revenant, a uber-masculin ego trip for which I did not care. Sure, it'll finally win Leo his Oscar (Best Grunter in a Leading Role), but seldom has a movie taken so long to say so little. Even The Hateful Eight was better in this respect. The Fox publicists will no doubt move heaven and earth to pitch it as an 'issue movie' about displaced indigenous peoples, but in truth it's a barren, simplistic revenge saga stretched over what feels like 3 hours of disturbing, unpleasant misery porn. While I certainly can't fault the nominations for Inarritu's sound, vfx and design crews (and of course Chivo), it troubles me to envision the Academy seriously considering this for the win.

Far behind those two craft hogs, The Martian was a distant second with seve, followed by Spotlight, Bridge of Spies and Carol with six nods apiece. And yet one of these things is tragically not like the others: Carol was left oft the Best Picture ballot, which only numbered eight for the second straight year. If something as subtle and refined as Spotlight can make it in (and possibly win), why not Todd Haynes' exquisite masterwork? (Some have proposed that the tired old #OscarsSoWhite hashtag should be replaced with #OscarsSoMale)

Check out more knee-jerk reactions -- and a few cursory predictions -- after the cut.

Golden Globe nominations

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association sounded off this morning on the heels of yesterday's SAG nominations, adding fuel to the campaign fire of many a project. Flagging contenders like The Martian, Joy, and various acting hopefuls got some badly needed exposure, while the unlikely Oscar player Mad Max: Fury Road kept its engines purring with a pair of citations in top categories. The nomination leader: Critics' pet Carol, which continues its maddening lethargic roll-out. It had damn well better speed up after this successful showing.

Check all the feature film categories with some quick thoughts of mine:

Best Picture - Drama
Carol
Mad Max: Fury Road
The Revenant
Room
Spotlight
Looking more and more like Spotlight is the only movie in this scattered season with enough widespread approval to make it a frontrunner. It may be that everybody else is just playing for nominations now, but there are important battles to be won in that contest; The Globes have been proving themselves far cooler than the Academy for a few seasons now, and here's AMPAS's chance to keep in step. Putting these five on the Oscar Best Picture ballot would be a good start (I know I say this without having seen Carol or The Revenant yet, but I have high hopes, and the other three are highly deserving).

SAG nominations scattered amongst the pretenders

The first big guild announcement of the season dropped this morning, but when all is said and done, it may not have been such an impactful announcement.

SAG's attention was splintered all over the place, and seems especially out of sync with pundit logic this season. Aggressively campaigned films like Trumbo and The Big Short performed well, but could both conceivably be shut out the Oscars. Some categories could even have as little as an 0/5 overlap with the eventual Oscar slate (especially that Supporting Actor category). For the time being, it keeps any frontrunners a happy mystery. Check out the nominees and my brief knee-jerks after the jump.

Is nomination leader Trumbo really an Oscar threat? Perhaps for Crantson...

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.