The Best Picture

Five Thirty Eight is dead wrong about the Oscars. Okay, really, their picks are mostly inline with reality and the zeitgeist. But, they are very confused about the Best Picture award.

They list the odds in order:

The Big Short
Spotlight
Mad Max: Fury Road
The Revenant
The Martian
Bridge of Spies
Room
Brooklyn


That list is all wrong.  The order, and odds are:

Mad Max: Fury Road 60%
The Revenant 25%
The Martian 10%

Any other movie 5%

Asleep inside a deconstructed horse

Alejandro Inarritu’s The Revenant is a massive film. Big is the word that keeps crashing in your brain while watching it. The vistas are big. The Themes are big. The characters are big (psychologically if not always physically). The brutality is big.  This is just a big damned film. 

Brutal is another word that cannot be escaped. Toward the end of the movie there is a fight in which one character has his fingers chopped off and it is the least violent thing to happen in the scene. This is Cormac McCarthy violence. Blood Meridian violence.  And it is everywhere.  The Americans are violent. The French are violent. The Native Americans are violent. And, above and beyond all of that, nature is violent. In tooth and claw and trunk and branch.

Perhaps the most extraordinary part of this film is the camera. Inarritu uses a disinterested style in which, through long almost languid shots, the camera finds the actions (or sometimes fails to find it). We in the audience must just observe. The camera, like nature, is disinterested.

I recognize that my thoughts here are scattered – I saw this at an advance screening last night and have not really slept yet. Sorry