A funny thing happened to the Academy Awards last year: a film that had seemed most unlikely to take the top prize swept through the industry. It did not win across the pond in the UK, but Birdman did win the PGA in a shocker, then the DGA, SAG Awards Ensemble, and ultimately the Oscar. Heading into the PGA, no one could have predicted Birdman would win. It just seemed… too dark, too angry, too… modern. Birdman was about the plight of the modern male artist grappling with futility in a world changing all around him, an industry evolving in a distasteful direction. It was similar to Billy Wilder’s Lost Weekend only without the alcohol part. In many ways, Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s follow-up, The Revenant, is not all that removed from Birdman. It just takes place in a different era and the horrors are ratcheted up a few notches. Still, it’s a man in peril struggling for survival amid inhospitable surroundings and paying a steep price to get revenge. Doesn’t Riggan also aim for survival and revenge in Birdman?
We the pundits, though, have long had our fingers on the pulse of a different kind of Oscar voter: the one who soothes himself with tales that take place in the much more understandable realm of the past. Not just any past, but often in the idyllic days where there were clearly definable heroes drawing a clear ethical line between right and wrong, even while the world around them was falling apart. The presence of this recurrent theme has helped us to figure out what voters across Hollywood might be thinking. You can’t just say “Oscar voters” anymore when the whole industry falls in line behind the same film.
The Hurt Locker in 2009, The King’s Speech in 2010, The Artist in 2011, Argo in 2012, Birdman in 2013 can all be described as films that revolve around some lone handicapped protagonist crawling his way out of despair to find success. The Iraq war, England on the eve of World War II, Hollywood changing from silent films to talkies, the hostage crisis in Iran, and Hollywood’s bread-and-butter changing from respectable dramas to superhero movies. While Birdman seems typical for what Oscar and other industry voters might go for, it was atypical as an Oscar winner.
Our stat model for predicting The Big Short to win the PGA is one that almost every Oscar frontrunner has had: SAG Awards Ensemble nomination, ACE Eddie nod, DGA, PGA, BAFTA Picture and Director nominations. Certainly both Boyhood and Birdman fit. There was no way to exclude either one of them if you were looking objectively at the stats last year. The only slight difference was that Birdman was lacking an Oscar editing nomination. That matters less because the voting members in that branch are less (as well as the fact that muddied the water: Birdman boasted incessantly about being one long unedited shot). What mattered more were the 6,000 voting members of ACE (who rightly realized that the “fact” of a 2-hour unedited shot actually involved dozens of invisible edits). If 6,000 people think your movie is the best of the year, that means something. Still, there was something about Birdman that made me and others dismiss it as a winner. What was it? It seemed… too modern, too experimental and avant-garde.
Now, The Big Short has followed Birdman’s surprise PGA win with another total longshot prediction. Even though I had it as a predicted winner heading into the PGA Awards, deep down I didn’t think it would win. I thought it would either be Spotlight or The Revenant. That it’s become the new Best Picture frontrunner is as surprising as Birdman’s late-breaking emergence last year. We still don’t know if The Big Short will take the DGA or SAG Awards Ensemble. In both of those instances, we will once again have thousands of people voting. 15,000 in DGA and 160,000 in SAG-AFTRA. Those are huge numbers. SAG, in particular, is the wild card.
The DGA will likely vote more for the film they like rather than the big name. So far the only intel we have is that 7,000 producers voted on The Big Short on a preferential ballot. Even though many of us still thought Boyhood would win until the very last — mainly because of BAFTA but more because we were all having a hard time grappling with Birdman as Oscar-friendly enough, Boyhood just didn’t fit with what we think we know about Academy members.
That The Big Short might be the film that prevails is another wake-up call to us pundits that the industry voters are moving in a slightly different direction — away from nostalgia and toward a different kind of emotional register. They did have that spectacular run starting back in 2006 with The Departed, then No Country for Old Men, then Slumdog Millionaire and finishing with The Hurt Locker. After that, they seemed to revert to more typical expectations, choosing The King’s Speech, The Artist, and Argo. If we have two consecutive years with Birdman and The Big Short, it seems like this could be the beginning of another interesting run of films that don’t seem like “Oscar movies.”
The Big Short certainly does stand out amid other brilliant films up for Best Picture in one of the most exciting lineups in a very long while. Mad Max: Fury Road, The Revenant are two daring spectacles that manage to build an epic blockbuster vision without much computer assistance. The Revenant’s biggest visual effect is the natural world and George Miller built nearly all of his own elements for Mad Max. Then there’s Spotlight, as smooth and perfect of a film that has ever landed in the race. The Martian is still the most entertaining film of the year and the only one in the lineup that leaves you feeling unadulterated joy and optimism for humanity by the end of it. The immersive Brooklyn and Steven Spielberg’s meditative Bridge of Spies are the closest examples of “Oscar movies” in the race. And they too are brilliant. The terrifying and moving Room might have stood a stronger chance, given its position after winning the Toronto audience award, but by the very nature of its subject and style is probably regarded as the “smallest” of the nominees. So it’s no wonder The Big Short stands out. Of all of this year’s distinguished contenders, it is the only film that gets its charge from what’s happening in the world right now. Like Birdman, The Big Short is not about the distant past; it couldn’t be more about today.
To have the Best Picture race cleave so close to the present day with the past two winners is odd, though both The Hurt Locker and The Departed certainly fit that contemporary bill. For many of us, the filmmaking of Birdman seemed too innovative for the traditional, drama loving Academy and yet that is exactly what they reached for. At first glance, Adam McKay’s dizzying, unique tragicomedy also seems too innovative, too strange, too inventive for the traditional voters, and yet, here we are.
It’s always a good thing when unwritten but adhered-to rules like “they will never go for that” get broken. With three strong contenders this year, that exciting possibility applies: Mad Max, The Revenant and yes, The Big Short. Maybe it doesn’t mean much. Maybe it means everything.