Oh, My Achin’ Attention Span: Spotlight on “Spotlight”

Welcome to “Oh, My Achin’ Attention Span”, where I, The Gypsy, will feature a deep dive on whatever pop culture item has my attention this week, with a focus on technical aspects, philosophy, and humor. Typically, these posts will drop on Monday, but what can I say, I’m feeling generous. This time around it’s our latest Best Picture winner, “Spotlight”.

Yay! “Spotlight” won! This is a victory not just for the film itself, but for everyone still mad that The King’s Speech, Slum dog Millionaire, Shakespeare in Love, and (ugh) Crash won. Now while these movies are not necessarily bad, they were certainly not the Best Picture of the year. Fans, like me, of these pictures’ fellow nominees tend to bemoan these happenings, much more than necessary according to anyone who has made the mistake of talking to me about it. But why do these movies, that, in retrospect, shouldn’t have won, or, in some cases, shouldn’t have even been nominated, get nominated? Prepare for knowledge!

Now, a warning: Dear Women’s Studies Majors and Guys Trying to Have Sex with Women’s Studies Majors, I’m going to touch on the idea of “Issues” films, in particular films involving sexual assault. I’m not taking a stand on the depiction of this in film, I’m just pointing out a correlation. Please submit your Holier-Than-Thou type comments elsewhere. Any other comments from you lovely people are totally welcome!

Also, this is not an article for film historians, so if I leave out some more obscure films as examples, feel free to comment below and keep the conversation going.

How many of you saw every best picture nominee this year? A few? OK. Now, how many of you have jobs that demand a larger than average portion of your time? Right. Members of the Academy are typically going to answer yes to the latter and are expected to answer yes to the former. Odds are every year you’re going to have a lot of uninformed academy members voting simply because they can. This is not a new phenomenon. As I write this, Trump is crushing Super Tuesday for what I have to believe is this reason.

These uninformed Academy voters are not completely in the dark. They know the stars, the premise, and issues talked about in the film. It is through this information that they are able to categorize the film and decide if it should get the nomination. This is how the movie “4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days” came to be known as “The Romanian Abortion Movie” even though hardly anyone saw it. Everyone knows there are certain kinds of movies that get nominated for Academy Awards, including the Academy. It’s self-perpetuating.

Let’s take a look at one of the categories that “Spotlight” falls into, the Star-Studded-Ensemble-Cast movie. You don’t need a film history class to see this one in action. The last decade of nominees is rife with them. Working backwards we have “The Martian”, “The Big Short”, “Birdman”, “Selma”, “Milk”, “Little Miss Sunshine”, “The Departed”, and any David O. Russell movie. The reason that big studios like having big names on the marquee is very similar to the reason that little films like it. Name recognition brings the big bucks, or for the little guys, it brings the awards, which sequentially brings the big bucks.

A less obvious of the Academy’s favorite categories is the Journalism movie. Hollywood loves to talk about itself. It’s part of the reason “Birdman” won last year. But, as Hollywood thinks of journalism as less “true showbiz” and more like a redheaded stepchild, this is usually only good for a nomination, not a win. This holds true even if you’re widely considered the best movie of all time, like “Citizen Kane”. Other notable entries into this category include “Network”, Foreign Correspondent”, “Gentleman’s Agreement”, “All the President’s Men”, “The Killing Fields”, “Broadcast News”, “The Insider”, and “Good Night and Good Luck”. In ’75 alone you had “Network” and “All the President’s Men” and they still lost to “Rocky” (trust me, you don’t wanna get me started).

Now we get to the real clincher, Movies-About-Issues. Movies are a great escape, but they have also reflected the problems in the world we live in since the beginning. In the forties, “Casablanca” and “Mrs. Miniver” addressed the effects of WWII that we couldn’t see back home. When the civil rights movement was rocking the 60’s, and Sydney Poitier was apparently the only black man that the academy was cool with (Hey! That’s still one more than this last year!), we got “In the Heat of the Night” and “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner”. In the 70’s we were dealing with the Vietnam War and it’s fallout, so we got “Coming Home” and “The Deer Hunter”. We also got this in the 80’s, with “Born on the Fourth of July” and “Platoon”, but that’s just because in the 70’s Oliver Stone hadn’t yet graduated from BYOTHWMMT, or Beat You Over The Head With My Message Tech. AIDS ravaged the 80’s, so we got some movies humanizing the LGBTQ community, like “The Crying Game” and “Kiss of the Spider Woman”. The OO’s saw our international relations take a hit, so we got “Babel” and “Zero Dark Thirty”. We even had the financial crisis touched on this year in The Big Short. So, yeah, it’s a tradition.

The hot topic the last five years seems to have been sexual assault(I look forward to your letters). If your movie had something to do with it, especially if paired with another issue, you were golden. This year alone we had “Room”, “Mad Max: Fury Road”, and, of course, “Spotlight”. Going back further, we have “12 Years a Slave”(coupled with race/slavery) “Precious”(coupled with poverty), and “The Reader”(coupled with the holocaust).

In researching this article, I thought it would be fun to look into our recent history and find the last film that won under similar conditions. It looks like it was . . . no . . . NO . . . OH SWEET BABY RAY’S, NO!

It was “Crash”. Ensemble cast. Issues out the wazoo. A sexual assault.

Nuts.

But wait, you might be asking yourself: “Was ‘Spotlight’ not the amazing movie I think it was?”

Of course it was. The funny thing is despite the Academy voting like a burnout using Sparknotes or a hack pitmaster boiling ribs, they still get it right a fair amount of the time. Great casts tend to make great films. Issues ARE important and are memorable because of it. Journalism . . . seemed like a great idea for a major in college? Whatever. You get the idea.

The more important question now is: Did it’s victory just become hollow for you?

Photo credit: Disney | ABC Television Group via VisualHunt.com / CC BY-ND