2016 Calvin Awards: Best Picture
By David Mumpower
February 26, 2016
BoxOfficeProphets.com
2016 is the same in this regard. For the second consecutive year, the battle for first place was hotly contested. Four films remained in competition until the final two votes, and the ultimate outcome remained undecided until the last ballot. In the end, the title that led throughout the voting ultimately dropped to third place while the feature named on the most overall ballots fell just short of victory. The winner, fittingly enough, received easily the most first place votes, which isn’t always the case in our tabulation system, one that rewards quantity of ballot selections as heavily as placement.
Mad Max: Fury Road is our choice as the Best Picture this year. Our voters voted it the best film almost twice as much as any selection. In the process, it became the film with the most number one picks since Gravity, demonstrating just how passionate our staff was about George Miller’s return to his directorial roots.
What caused us to laud Mad Max: Fury Road over all other films? I have a simple theory on this topic. Think about all the complexities of modern cinema, all the sweeping story arcs that viewers find equal parts engaging and perplexing. Now consider the fourth Mad Max adventure. Our hero starts in one place. Then, he drives somewhere else for a while. Finally, he turns around and heads back home. That’s the entire story structure of Fury Road, yet it totally works.
The reason why is that Miller delivers a kind of Master’s Class in conflict. From the opening moments of the movie, the titular lead is in danger. In literally every sequence from start to finish, he faces danger in some form, starting with kidnapping. Later, Max escapes and makes his way to an 18-wheeler. In front of him is every man’s fantasy, a harem of women so beautiful, the whole situation seems like a mirage. What does Max care about? They have drinking water. These subtle slices of misdirection permeate throughout the sublime action, with Miller sprinkling sparks of creativity and innovation along the way.
In an age when people in capes and spandex dominate the cinematic landscape, Mad Max: Fury Road subjects viewers to a grimy world full of hatred and spite. It’s the film world equivalent of Smells Like Teen Spirit singlehandedly assaulting the entire Hair Band music era. For this reason, 36 years after the introduction of Mad Max as a character, he somehow feels bold and new again. Movie lovers had to wait 30 years for a new Mad Max movie, but Fury Road was worth the wait. That’s why it’s our staff’s choice as Best Picture of the year.
Everyone falls asleep during Econ 101. That’s its primary purpose as a core class requisite. Students get to nap off the prior night’s festivities. The dull nature of economics is the reason why so few people supported the idea of charging bankers for their fraudulent activities during the housing crisis. It’s difficult to prosecute someone for larcenous activities only a small percentage of the world understands.
All of these reasons underscore what an amazing triumph The Big Short is. It takes one of the most inscrutable business concepts ever created, the CDO (aka collateralized debt obligation), and it relays the true events of how a few people bet against the most stable economic structure in the world. Men like Michael Burry and Mark Baum invested all their money in an odd gamble against the housing market, and they won. Despite their earning literally hundreds of millions of dollars, none of them walked away from the situation unscathed. The Big Short tells an infuriating story about the mercurial madness of big business, and it does so with an inimitable kind of verve. The fourth wall has never been shattered so entertainingly. Had one more voter turned in their ballot as promised prior to the deadline, it would’ve won the title of Best Picture. Since they didn’t, it lost by four measly points. The voting was that close.
Inside Out was our leader in the clubhouse throughout most of January. If we’d kept our original voting deadline, it would’ve won the Best Picture race by a comfortable margin. Alas, its primary advantage was that most people had already seen it by that point. As voters caught up on the other films this year and word got out that our staff favored four films above all others, Inside Out started to fade a bit in comparison to the projects above. The end result is that it slides to third place by only 11 points, basically a ballot’s difference from first place.
What we love about Inside Out is self-evident. Pixar has crafted another masterpiece about the difficulties of growing up. They first told a version of this story with Toy Story and also explored the themes in other classics such as Monsters, Inc. and Up. With Inside Out, they’ve taken on an entirely new appreciation, taking the audience inside the head of a preteen girl who is emotionally unequipped to handle her cross-country move from snowy Minnesota to sunny San Francisco. It’s a tender, touching tale of tween trauma. More importantly, it’s functionally a girl’s version of Where the Wild Things Are (the book, not the movie). Somehow, Pixar once again finds the perfect balance between children’s entertainment and adult themes. Inside Out narrowly missed becoming their third title to win Best Picture at The Calvins before eventually settling for third place.
The gap in the voting occurs between fourth and fifth place. Spotlight, our fourth selection, was also in the running for Best Picture up until the final two votes. After briefly leading with all but six votes counted, it eventually fell back a bit compared to the three titles above. Still, our staff adored this important procedural about the dangers of covering up heinous behavior, similar to Philomena two years ago. Spotlight is more than just a great movie. It also highlights the importance of investigative journalism in an era when so many people confuse clickbait with headline news.
Falling well behind Spotlight are the leaders of the second tier of voting, The Revenant and The Martian. They finished in fifth and sixth place, respectively, but neither one was ever a serious contender in the category. Still, we loved Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s follow-up to Birdman for its viciousness and verisimilitude. Meanwhile, if there were a category of Best Novel at The Calvins (and a few of our voters have begged for it), The Martian would have dominated a couple of years ago. As such, it’s no surprise that we loved the movie as well. Like The Big Short and Spotlight, it features a who’s who list of A-list Hollywood actors all dialing back their egos in order to work together on an amazing ensemble piece.
A robot and Steve Jobs finished in seventh and eighth place this year. The jokes pretty much write themselves. Our staff adored Ex Machina for its nihilism as well as its exploration of mankind’s recent attempts to play God through robotics. Ex Machina, like Primer before it, isn’t attempting to answer any big questions. It simply wants to raise them in hopes that somebody else will decipher the answers one day.
Steve Jobs is also a hard movie to love but for different reasons. The movie works due to the incongruity of the man himself. From nothing, he built Apple into a powerful corporation. Then, they fired him and when he returned, he came back half-evil genius and half-mean bastard. Somebody with that personality combo is just as likely to enslave humanity as they are to invent the iPhone. So count your blessings, folks. Anyway, we felt the same way about it as we did about previous category winner, The Social Network. The moral bankruptcy of the lead character only increased our engagement with the story.
Our final two selections this year are Bridge of Spies and Room. If you’re keeping score at home, this means BOP’s top ten includes all but one of the seven nominees for Best Picture at this year’s Academy Awards. Way to go, Oscar voters! You finally got it right! As for the film we left out, tough luck, Brooklyn. We still love BBC Films and Nick Hornby, we swear! Anyway, we already selected Mark Rylance as Best Supporting Actor and Brie Larson as Best Actress, so those were huge clues about how much we love each movie. Bridge of Spies is a wonderful throwback tale about espionage and hardliner negotiations during the Cold War, while Room includes one of the most harrowing escape attempt sequences since Clint Eastwood tried to get out of Alcatraz.
As always, Best Picture was extremely competitive at the bottom of the list. Roughly 60 films earned votes in the category. The titles that came closest to nomination include Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Carol, Straight Outta Compton, The Hateful Eight, It Follows, Brooklyn, and Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation. Below, you can see the full list of our favorite 25 movies released during the last year.
Calvins Intro
Best Actor
Best Actress
Best Album
Best Cast
Best Character
Best Director
Best Overlooked Film
Best Picture
Best Scene
Best Screenplay
Best Supporting Actor
Best Supporting Actress
Best TV Show
Best Use of Music
Breakthrough Performance
Worst Performance
Worst Picture