If I Were an Academy Member: Edwin Davies
By Edwin Davies
February 27, 2016
BoxOfficeProphets.com
There's an astonishing hour-long experimental film in The Revenant, and an entertaining 90 minute Western. Unfortunately, the way in which it cuts between the two halves of its nature fatally undo both. The first, which focuses on Leonardo DiCaprio's desperate quest for troph, er, revenge is a harrowing and bold attempt to take people inside the mind of a man who has been pushed to the edge and just kept going. But every time that it leaves that film and shows whatever Tom Hardy is mumbling about, it reminds us that we're watching a pretty cliched story that is being dressed up to look more significant, and it's hard not to come away thinking that the whole thing is an exceptionally well-executed shell game.
7) The Big Short
There's a palpable tension at the heart of The Big Short between its need to educate and its desire to entertain. That tension breaks through in its many fourth wall-breaking moments, and it gives the story an energy that is pretty much unique in director Adam McKay's filmography, but the film never completely resolves it, making for an experience which is both consistently funny and invigorating, yet deeply unsatisfying. It's an admirable attempt to try to explain the complexities of the 2007-08 economic collapse in a way which is broadly entertaining, but its jokes and its anger never quite gel.
6) Bridge of Spies
Re-teaming director Steven Spielberg with Tom Hanks for the first time in more than a decade, Bridge of Spies is at its best when it deals with the relationship between Hanks' lawyer and a Soviet spy, played brilliantly by Mark Rylance. Their scenes together are funny, charming, yet underpinned by an intense interest in how two men from different ideological points can find common ground. It loses a lot of its charm once it moves to Berlin and gets into the weeds of international espionage, and that will probably lead to it being remembered as one of Spielberg's more minor works. Still, minor Spielberg is better than a lot of directors' major works.
5) The Martian
Ridley Scott's work has become increasingly bleak and pessimistic in recent years, culminating in the one-two punch of Prometheus and The Counselor, two films that displayed relatively little faith in humanity. That makes The Martian one of the most startling about-faces in recent memory. It's a big, open-hearted celebration of science and the possibility of mankind to do great things if we set aside our differences. It also manages to retain most of the heavy-duty science of the book without becoming impenetrable, and maintains a light, breezy and funny tone without dumbing everything down. Is it a great work of cinema? Probably not. But it's an immensely enjoyable and genuinely uplifting slice of populist entertainment that doesn't feel like a Best Picture winner, which may be the greatest thing about its nomination.
4) Spotlight
The best films about journalists are themselves works of journalism. They're less concerned with histrionics and eureka moments than they are with the process of gathering information, sorting through it, and trying to make sense of a wealth of disparate facts. Spotlight is a great example of the form, one which takes Tom McCarthy's typically laid-back style and applies it to the more rigorous structure of the investigation into a decades-long sexual abuse scandal. The final result is not showy, but its meticulousness is admirable, though there's still plenty of room for its talented cast to bring some ruffled life to their characters.
3) Brooklyn
It would be easy to dismiss Brooklyn as the kind of pleasant, middlebrow literary adaptation that The Academy tends to favor. While it's undeniably gentile and nice, neither of which are adjectives that get the blood pumping, it's also an incredibly well-realized example of a type of film that can be so mediocre. It's a beautiful, heartwarming romance that finds its tension from the points at which good intentions come into conflict. There's no out and out villain in Brooklyn, just people who want different things, and watching Saoirse Ronan, Emory Cohen and Domhnall Gleeson articulate and navigate those intricacies makes it one of the most warm and human films of the year. It's that very quality which makes its more conventional moments hit harder than they would in a more typical rendering of this story.
2) Room
It's easy to imagine a version of Room that is completely terrible. A version that takes the premise of a woman and her young child being held captive for years and turns it into cloying melodrama or pure exploitation. Lenny Abrahamson's film is much more restrained than either of those scenarios, painfully so at times, but it's also far stranger and more disorientating than his minimalist approach would suggest. By keeping Jack (Jacob Tremblay, giving one of THE great child performances), a young boy who has only ever known the inside of a small room, as the audience's viewpoint, he and screenwriter Emma Donoghue (adapting her own novel) tell a tale of survival that is as much about the difficulties of adjusting to a new world as it is about the mechanics of escaping a terrible situation. That they handle both beautifully is a testament to the skill of everyone involved.
1) Mad Max: Fury Road
Everything about Mad Max: Fury Road is a miracle. A fourth film in a franchise, one that comes 30 years after the previous installment, shouldn't be one of the best films of the year, yet it was. An aggressively idiosyncratic work from a veteran filmmaker shouldn't connect with a mass audience, yet it did. And a summer blockbuster should not be nominated for Best Picture, yet it was. So much has been written about how great Mad Max: Fury Road is as a technical achievement, as a work of entertainment, and as a brash assault on misogyny, so I don't need to reiterate it. All that needs saying is that it's one of the most distinctive blockbusters in recent memory, and that its critical and commercial success are reason enough to have hope in the future of big-budget filmmaking.