Just out of curiosity, of the 10 films that were nominated this year, was there one that you felt was worthy of being best picture? What about it made you feel that way?
I felt pretty much the same way, although I did feel it was worthy of its nom. (I also saw it after the Oscars, but did see it on a big screen.)
It was a well done movie that worked with excellent editing. But I, too, was disappointed; I expected it to be near brilliant because I thought The Big Short was fantastic, which didn’t win, of course.
(FTR: have not sees The Revenant, Brooklyn, nor all of Bridge of Spies, which was a “sneak-in” after another movie and I had other efforts in procrastination to attend to.)
SpoilerVirgin, there were 8 nominees. The current rule is that there must be between 5 and 10 nominees. Each nominee must received at least 5% of the nominations. If this would bring the total below 5 nominees, the top 5 are included among the nominees:
Two cents from a still devout Catholic:
Of COURSE I was outraged by the actual scandal. I have stated numerous times on these boards that, if there are any plausible cases to be made, I want some bishops to do jail time for obstruction of justice or acting as accessories after the fact. I wouldn’t even mind seeing RICO invoked (if the Church hierarchy doesn’t want to be treated like the Mafia, they shouldn’t ACT like the goddamn Mafia).
It doesn’t follow that ***Spotlight ***was a great movie. Just like the aforementioned Stanley Kramer, ***Spotlight ***took an important issue and made a rather forgettable movie about it.
There’s another angle to the sex abuse in Boston that the movie doesn’t dwell on: Father Paul Shanley was the Boston Globe’s favorite Catholic priest. Don’t take my word for it, do some Googling. Shanley got away with murder in PART because the liberal reporters of the Boston Globe adored him. They glorified him as a gay, liberal hippie “street priest.” It’s inexcusable that his bishops looked the other way when he screwed teenage boys, but the truth is, the Boston Globe looked the other way for decades too, because they liked Shanley.
Ross Douthat put it best: the sex scandals in Boston displayed the worst parts of BOTH Vatican II Catholicism AND old school, conservative Catholicism. You had liberal gay priests like Shanley and Geoghan who thought the old rules didn’t apply to them, and you had conservative bishops like Bernard Law, who thought the best thing was to “treat the faithful like mushrooms- keep them in the dark and feed them some bullshit now and then.”
Neither side gave a damn about the actual flesh-and-blood victims of these crimes. And for the most part, neither did the Boston Globe.