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Factor Three: They Like What They Like.

So, it’s over, The Big Short will win, right? Not so fast. Stats are powerful, but they’re not the whole picture. Birdman won last year without that supposedly magical Best Editing nod. Argo won without a Best Director nomination, etc.

They like what they like. They do not vote like robots looking at stats and checked boxes.

I do not speak to Academy members so I cannot speak to what they like, but I do know the type of movies the industry likes. The Revenant is a HOLLYWOOD, capital letters project. It is majestic, beautiful, and technically almost perfect. It is filmmaking at its best. It is moviemakers taking their love of film to amazing extremes, bearing it all on the screens.

You watch past Western-style winners from Unforgiven to Dances with Wolves to No Country for Old Men and you can’t help but feel that The Revenant obliterates all three put together when it comes to its mastery of technique, beauty, and craft. The director refused to have sets. He filmed in natural environments using 360 degree angles. Sure, the story is much flatter - revenge with a touch of illusion - but it’s honestly good enough. The Revenant is an epic of the style that was common to win in the 1990s. It is a grand old movie, a big production that cost over $130 million to make and that is making the money back twice over. Moviegoers are paying money to sit there for three hours and watch a mostly dialogue-less, extremely violent movie about revenge. It is the story of Hollywood success pure and simple.

A year after Birdman was crowned because it was about the anxieties of Hollywood, to come back with a big Hollywood success!!. My god, what a Hollywood kind of ending. You could not have scripted that in your wildest dreams.

Oh, to be sure, The Big Short will not go down without a fight. The Big Short is about the single most important and most devastating political and economic and cultural event of the 21st Century, after maybe 9/11, and how we are still paying for its consequences. It is highly relevant in this highly politicized world of a presidential election, a Supreme Court vacancy, and a corrupt Wall Street. It reminds us that greed is dangerous and that ignoring it is worse. It would most definitely plant the Academy’s flag firmly on the side of social and economic justice.

But, do they care about that as much as they do about the typical Hollywood movie? Do not get me wrong: I believe in the logic of the preferential ballot. Very much so: it means that movies that are divisive and difficult for some struggle. The Revenant has a lot of negative reviews by critics. If it loses, it will be because of the preferential ballot.

But, for the final time, critics are not the Academy. Critics wanted Boyhood, they wanted The Social Network, they mocked The Artist and Argo. None of this mattered to those 6,000 cooky old white men. The fact that critics do not like The Revenant does not mean it’s divisive within the industry. Chicago and Crash had horrible reviews too. And, I suspect, even people who do not pick The Revenant as their favorite movie ever, will not be able to help putting it relatively high on the ballot, again because of that admiration for its production values. The Big Short confuses some people (for better or for worse).

The Revenant is precisely that: the return of a man who just last year was anointed king of Hollywood for making a movie about the great conundrum that the industry faces today between watered down superheroes and the desire to be a serious artist.

That, in one concept, is why The Revenant will win Best Picture at the Oscars.

Will win: The Revenant
Could win: The Big Short

That’s all she wrote.

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