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2. Spotlight

The one thing that has happened since I wrote my top 10 list two months ago is that I’ve moved The Big Short to the top of the three Best Picture movies I liked. This does not mean that I have any less appreciation for Spotlight. The strongest point of Spotlight is its subtlety - its refusal, in a way, like The Revenant, to kowtow to what critics and audiences would have expected from a movie about this topic: incendiary controversy, dramatic overreach, and preachy zealotry. It is matter of fact, exacting, about the story it narrates, a clear allegory for the style of reporting that it is exalting.

Spotlight is a guarded reminder of the evils that can transpire when people refuse to speak up, when people capitulate to “the way things are.” But it is also a tremendously uplifting nudge towards the good that can be accomplished by collective, determined, action. The movie refuses to fall for the cheesy denouement, the clichéd explosive, discovery moment. For that reason, it may ultimately lose the Best Picture Oscar. For that reason, of course, it may win it. It remains, despite that, one of the most important movies of the year because it exemplifies that there is an alternative to passivity in society and that, in the world of film, there is an alternative to blasé story-telling with overly used arcs.

1. The Big Short

But if I were an Oscar voter, I think I would have to vote for The Big Short (and, perhaps, I should switch my predictions before it’s too late!). The Big Short is a powerful, sarcastic, whimsical, punchy reminder of many of the things that Spotlight reminds us of, but the stakes are, in many ways, higher.

At a time when the reverberations of the Great Recession of 2008 are still felt in our society, when the Nation and the World are being called upon to decide which way we go from here, what we do with some of our broken institutions, what we do about those that have been left behind, The Big Short reminds us that, much contrary to that infamous phrase that made Gordon Gekko a household name, greed is NOT good. Unabashed greed putrefies the human soul until it becomes a senseless machine that destroys everything in its path.

Like The Wolf of Wall Street before it, The Big Short accomplishes this brilliantly, with its sarcasm, its over-satirical representations of players in the collapse (from greedy mortgage brokers to blind regulators and bought-off politicians), with its refusal to apologize or gloss over the nature of our problems. It does so with its punchy lines, and with its simply tragic ending--when for one moment Ryan Gosling’s sarcasm-dripping voice edges a notch into the serious and declares “just kidding” about the fact that those responsible were made to pay.

The flashy condos, the expensive dinners, the beautiful women, are all on display as part of the perversion of that American dream of success; they are all the apple that calls to Adam and which he is unable to resist. We were cast away from paradise, The Big Short tells us, because we lost that purity, that humanity. God help us if we don’t wake up to that.

The Big Short is the most important movie of the year, and would have my vote for that reason alone.

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