The Academy got it right: 'Spotlight' is a better film than 'The Revenant'

At the 88th annual Academy Awards, the best picture race was a toss-up between a grandiose technical extravaganza and a subtle character study, a situation that felt oddly familiar. In 2015, members of the Academy went with Birdman over Boyhood, the latter being a more impactful work of art overall. But it could hardly compete with the former, which seemed practically designed in lab for the sole purpose of winning Oscars, complete with a thesis about how crucial show business is and how critics just don't know what they're talking about. Who would have thought a group of artists would love a movie about how amazing artists are? This year, the opposite happened: The Academy picked a straightforward but effective exercise in storytelling, Spotlight, over the more Oscar-baity nominee, The Revenant. Thank God.

Indeed, one of the most notable aspects of Spotlight is how simple it is that you don't realize the emotional beats sneaking up on you. Tom McCarthy's film is essentially a procedural, following a group of reporters doing their job and uncovering a story more horrifying than they could have imagined. Beyond outlining the facts of the case, though, we leave with a clear understanding of who each of these reporters is as a human being. McCarthy does this without having to include unimportant subplots about their home life or relationships. Instead, we connect with the men and women by way of observing how they behave on the job and how they relate to their interview subjects. A fabulous moment when Sacha speaks with an abuse victim and struggles to be as sensitive as possible, or another where Michael waits in the lobby of an office all day to get the perfect interview, tells us all we need to know about both of them.

In that way, Spotlight does not come across as a film you'd expect to win an Oscar because it's so darn restrained. There are no extended monologues about the importance of journalism, no key emotional sequence written purely to score a Best Actor award and no showy film-making tricks put in place primarily to dazzle rather than to service the plot. It's nothing more or less than a well-written glimpse into the lives of four people, which then exposes us to an important issue without beating the lesson into our heads. Last year's Birdman, on the other hand, was structured entirely around on-the-nose speeches that directly spell out Alejandro Iñárritu's message, with an impressive but completely superfluous gimmick thrown in for good measure.

Spotlight wasn't exactly a lock, though, and Iñárritu nearly took home the top prize yet again with The Revenant, which sure does feel like a film you'd expect to win an Oscar. All we heard about throughout this awards season was just how challenging the project was for everyone involved, playing right into the Academy's tendency to reward difficult-to-make art over what was actually the best movie overall. "It took us nine months to shoot! It was freezing cold! Did you hear DiCaprio ate a real bison liver? Give us our damn Oscar!"

As impressive a feat as The Revenant objectively is, it was not even close to being the best film nominated this year. It was arguably the worst: overlong, repetitive, and often so over-the-top that the majority of my packed theater began laughing at, not with, the movie. After an unbelievable opening sequence, the remainder of The Revenant can essentially be summed up by a looped GIF of Leonardo DiCaprio crawling and grunting, plus an occasional detour into a boring subplot about a kidnapped daughter that goes virtually nowhere. And scene! It feels as if Iñárritu was so focused on the technical elements that would make his film an Oscar lock - beautiful cinematography, amazing visual set pieces and showy performances - that he ignored many of the elements that would make his film worthwhile or entertaining: memorable characters, solid pacing and anything interesting to say beyond "gee, it sure was difficult to survive in the 1800s." Oh, and "revenge is bad."

Take the relationship between Hugh Glass and his son, one that is remarkably cliche and instantly forgettable. Since this drives the entire plot, that's a massive problem. How about Tom Hardy's role as the hilariously over-the-top, mustache-twirling racist, John Fitzgerald? The characters are shallow, the pacing is all over the place, the story boils down to yet another generic revenge tale that we've seen literally hundreds of times before, and in the end, it feels less like we experienced a magnificent story and more like we were were given a 2 1/2 hour presentation about how technically astute Iñárritu's is.

The achievements of The Revenant certainly should not be discounted simply because the overall film doesn't work as well as it could have. It's impossible to claim that Iñárritu's directing was not absolutely marvelous, and a few of his long takes deserve to be studied in film classes. As a cinematic achievement, moments like the bear attack or the horse ride over the cliff are insane to the point that it boggles the mind imagining what went into making them. For those reasons, The Revenant has merit, and honoring Iñárritu with the prize for Best Director makes sense (although George Miller could have easily won for Mad Max: Fury Road, another incredible achievement that actually had a compelling plot).

But as Best Picture? Between The Revenant and Spotlight, it's got to be Spotlight and it's so refreshing that the Academy made the right choice. Instead of a movie that tells an uninteresting story in a bombastic way, they picked a movie that tells an extraordinary story in a simple, more effective way. Instead of a movie where actors cry, scream and cover themselves in dirt in an overt attempt to snatch up their golden statue, they picked a film where seasoned performers develop their characters using shared glances and pauses between words. It's that kind of subdued but tremendously poignant story that should be rewarded over shallow Oscar-bait and for that reason, for once, the Academy nailed it.