Oscars 2016: who should win?

As the Oscar countdown continues, Screendaily asks: who should win? Here are my answers for the big six categories, but remember this is about who should win from the actual nominations.

Best Picture
If one can get passed Carol's omission from the shortlist (and I'm still struggling on that one), one is faced with only three genuine contenders: The Revenant, Spotlight and The Big Short. Let's dispense with the bear attack movie first: great set-pieces, yes, but ultimately a shallow piece of mumblecore shot in awful/challenging conditions; Alejandro is in danger of losing the ground he regained with Birdman - he's becoming a parody of himself again.
That leaves one of the great movies about journalism and a great film about economic collapse. Spotlight's success lies in its restraint, it quietly burns with anger without ever catching melodramatic fire. There's nothing starry about Tom McCarthy's direction or the actors' performances, nothing to distract you from the stark facts it present before you.
The Big Short gets in your face, screaming for attention, throwing shock after shock at you. Given the widespread impact of the US subprime crisis, it's the movie with the most reach. It's arguably the most daring of the bunch, and proves the power of intelligent comedy.
Comparing the two films is difficult, they are such different beasts, but I believe The Big Short should win.

Best Director
If the purpose of the Best Director Oscar is to single out the director as star, then there are just two competitors in this race: Alejandro and George Miller. Each led huge productions in challenging conditions, pushing their cast and crew to the limit. Both wanted to have their cake and eat it, but only of them did consume their concoction. Best Director because he delivered a singular vision and created a new genre is George Miller if I had my way.

Best Actor
Not a great year for Best Actor. Obviously Leo has the momentum, but I really don't think that he was that good. But upon reviewing the rest of the field, he probably is the best of the bunch. I thought Fassbender was better as Macbeth than he was as Steve Jobs, but he was shortlisted for the latter.
Eddie Redmayne was good, but wasn't the best performer in The Danish Girl.
Matt Damon was hugely enjoyable, but it didn't seem like much of a stretch for him.
Bryan Cranston was wonderful in Trumbo, but just maybe the film is a little too traditional.
So it's Leo then.

Best Actress
There is no competition here: Charlotte Rampling should win. End of!

Best Supporting Actor
Mark Rylance has already won nine awards for his performance in Bridge of Spies, including the Bafta, and seems to be the outstanding favourite. However, I'm going to swim against the tide again and state that I don't think he was that good.
It's a weak shortlist, so I'm left with Christian Bale in The Big Short, but that's a pity fuck of a win.

Best Supporting Actress
This is a fight to the death between Alicia Vikander and Rooney Mara. Vikander has been everywhere over the past 18 months, seemingly in every other movie - and until The Danish Girl I wasn't really rating her. However, I thought she came of age as an actress in the gender op drama, stealing the film from Eddie Redmayne.
But the Oscar should go to Rooney Mara for her subtlety in Carol (I'll gloss over the fact that she's in the wrong category!).

The Big Short or how I learned to stop worrying about the sub-prime bomb

With the absence of Carol, the two most important films in the running for the Best Film Oscar are Spotlight and The Big Short. Here, I'm going to look at the latter.

I enjoyed Big Short more than I was expecting. Director Adam McKay is known for making comedies,  the Anchorman movies are what international audiences would recognise him for, and has not tackled a 'serious' movie like this before. But the producers chose wisely in giving him the director's chair and the chance to add his spin to Charles Randolph's screenplay. There was every chance that an investigation of the sub-prime mortgage crisis, while important, could be painfully dry, dull and difficult to comprehend… and The Big Short is none of those.

Just as Kubrick realised that the only way to approach a film about nuclear holocaust was to present it as a comedy (when we laugh, our mental guards are down and we are more receptive to difficult or challenging ideas), so McKay's secret was to film the economic breakdown as a jet-black comedy thriller. Of course, McKay doesn't stop there: [SPOILERS!] having Ryan Gosling's character break the fourth wall, backed by celebrity jargon busting (yeh, you had me at Margot Robbie in a bubble bath), is the icing on the cake. Indeed, McKay very nearly has his cake and eats it with gusto.

Steve Carell backs up his Foxcatcher performance with a turn that could easily have fallen into comedy OCD, but his Mark Baum has a rage that effectively acts as the audience's moral compass. Notwithstanding that his indignation may mean he's adopting the right mindset for the wrong reasons, Baum gives the audience a regular and biting reminder that while we are effectively rooting for the main characters to make their millions by betting on the US economy collapsing, those main characters are not true heroes, their victories entirely pyrrhic within a global context, and that the collapse had so many real victims. Carell's Baum is the only character that we get under the skin of.

Produced by Brad Pitt's Plan B production arm, Pitt takes the smallest and least showy of roles on offer as a former City slicker.  It's not the cleanest role (as in 12 Years A Slave where he played one of only two good white men in the film), there being some unexplored moral complexity here, his reasoning for helping two greenhorn would-be City traders make their millions frustratingly obscure.

Christian Bale as the sage hedge fund manager who spots the fault-line in the US economy is a little too predictably Christian Bale, just a little too Asperger's. It might be an honest recreation of the reality, but in a challenging film that still asks something of the audience's grey matter, Bale's performance feels a little off-key.

Gosling has more dialogue than he's had of late: it's almost a surprise to hear him speak. Nevertheless, his character is largely unexplored and asks little of his talent.

The Big Short is exceptionally well edited, by Hank Corwin (he's up for both the Bafta and the Oscar), giving the film a vital spring in its step, but he can't quite overcome the minor ebbing of energy as the tone shifts from black comedy to tragedy in the final act. Aiding that springing step is Barry Ackroyd's cinematography, although it's not the best work of his career.

Music choices throughout are spot-on, particularly towards the end with the [SPOILERS!] Brazil-style happy ending being scored to the electric version of Neil Young's Rockin' In The Free World, and the credit sting getting the Led out with the all-too-appropriate When The Levee Breaks.

The Big Short does a have a few issues then, but they are outweighed by how entertainingly it uncovers the corruption (professional and moral) at the heart of the US economy. That the films closes with a warning for the future is the final shock and seal of this great film.

Score: 8.5/10