This may be the tightest Oscar race in years.  With four films all having a legitimate chance to win.  So let's take a look at the night's biggest award
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The Best Picture Nominees
Spotlight
The Big Short
The Revenant
Mad Max: Fury Road
The Martian
Bridge of Spies
Brooklyn
Room

Even when the Oscar nominations were announced I still felt confident that Spotlight would win. It has all the makings of a Best Picture winner: it was well made, had a slew of talented actors giving great performances, and the story was understated yet powerful. I remember seeing the movie and being unable to move as the credits silently rolled. It is a movie that stuck with me, and I felt like it was the best overall made movie of the year. 

But then the Golden Globes and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) happened, and now it looks like The Revenant is the film to beat. Which is crazy to me. Don’t get me wrong; The Revenant is a good movie. But it wasn’t the best movie of the year. Take a look for example at Leonardo DiCaprio, the unanimous lock for Best Actor. There is no doubt that Leo can look like he is in pain, growl, and drool with the best of them, but years from now this movie won’t come to mind when I think of Leonardo DiCaprio. Director Alejandro Iñárritu has every reason to be proud of this movie—it is visually stunning as all of his movies have been—but long, cinematic shots of the wilderness is not enough to make this the best movie. In fact, I don’t know if The Revenant would make my top five movies of the year.

In term of visual wonder Mad Max: Fury Road is the most visually stunning movie of the bunch.  Doing 80% of his stunts live, and risking many of his actors’ lives to get the shots he wanted, George Miller leaves it all on the screen. His shots of the setting’s barren wasteland are bright and colorful, which makes the action sequences stand out. I remember sitting on the edge of my seat as I watched this movie; from the amazing action sequences to the man playing a guitar that shoots fire, this movie was utter madness and I loved it.  Not only that, but Miller took the Mad Max concept and made into a story about female empowerment—stand aside Max; Furiosa can handle this.  This story was a surprise, and deserves all the praise it is getting and more. 

The other movie that deserves serious consideration is The Big Short.  It’s just as good as Spotlight but it handles catastrophe in a different manner. The collapse of the housing market and its connection to the failure of the U.S. economy is a complex issue which I still don’t 100% understand, despite having seen the movie twice.  But the film explains it in a humorous way that I can begin to grasp.  This movie is peppered with dark humor, which is needed because the result of the real-life events depicted in the movie led to millions of people losing their homes and jobs. It’s also filled with outstanding actors who don’t mind breaking the fourth wall to get their points across.  Hopefully this movie has people thinking about their financial futures, and any movie that has the ability to change the way you think is a good movie.

Anyone of these movies could win the Best Picture.  Mad Max is definitely the longest shot to win, but it also racked up the most guild nominations, which is what makes up the Academy’s voting bloc. The Revenant is the odds-on favorite to win. But I will be rooting for Spotlight which was haunting and terrifying and beautiful.  It’s in their favor that Spotlight won the Screen Actors’ Guild award for Best Ensemble, and the SAG happens to make up the largest voting group in the Academy.  Who do you think will win?  Let me know, and enjoy the Academy Awards. 

The lead categories were kind of left wanting this year, but there are at least five men (and one boy) who could have been nominated for supporting actor.  Let’s look at both. 

Best Supporting Actor:
Christian Bale (The Big Short)
Tom Hardy (The Revenant)
Mark Ruffalo (Spotlight)
Mark Rylance (Bridge of Spies)
Sylvester Stallone (Creed)
 
Who Will Win: Sylvester Stallone
Who Should Win: Tom Hardy
 
Easily the most competitive of all the acting categories this year, I think Steve Carrell (The Big Short), Idris Elba (Beasts of No Nation), Jacob Tremblay (Room), Paul Dano (Love and Mercy), Jason Mitchell (Straight Outta Compton) and anyone from Spotlight all gave nomination-worthy performances, but there can only be five nominees and one winner. Mark Rylance as the Soviet spy had a chance, but he doesn’t get enough screen time to secure his place at the top.  Sylvester Stallone won the Golden Globe and is the odds-on favorite to win for a performance that is 50% Rocky and 50% Mickey from the original, an amazing combination that made audiences fall in love with the Rocky series all over again.  But in a movie that was supposed to belong to Leonardo DiCaprio the best performance in The Revenant is Tom Hardy’s. Hardy’s John Fitzgerald is a snake in the grass, completely loathsome, and far more captivating than Leo, who spends most of his time laying around. My heart wants Sly to win, but if I am being honest the award should go to Tom Hardy.
 
Best Actor:
Bryan Cranston (Trumbo)
Matt Damon (The Martian)
Leonardo DiCaprio (The Revenant)
Michael Fassbender (Steve Jobs)
Eddie Redmayne (The Danish Girl)
 
Who Will Win: Leonardo DiCaprio
Who Could Win: Leonardo DiCaprio
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While Matt Damon makes The Martian an entire letter grade better and Michael Fassbender is magnetic, if not entirely accurate in Steve Jobs, but this is Leo’s year. DiCaprio’s lack of Oscar has been the running joke around Hollywood for a while now, which is crazy to consider, since he is easily one of the best leading men out there. Even right now I am having trouble thinking of a single bad performance. The Revenant, however, isn’t one of his best performances. Off the top of my head, Leo was better in Blood Diamond, Catch Me If You Can, Shutter Island, and The Departed. Interestingly, Martin Scorsese, director of The Departed, won his own long overdue Oscar for that very movie, though that wasn’t his best picture. The Academy sometimes give these awards to whom they believe are due after a long career of amazing work, and that’s what is happening here. In a year of mediocre to good performances in the category Leo is probably the best of the crop to which this award was destined; it just took a while to get. 
 
Who do you think will win?  Let me know your predictions.  And tomorrow we tackle the granddaddy of them all, Best Picture.

I think this year was a much better year for the women in Hollywood than it was for the men, especially for the lead category. The women nominated put out stronger performances than their male counterparts, so let’s take a closer look at each category. 
 
Best Supporting Actress:
Jennifer Jason Leigh (The Hateful Eight) 
Rooney Mara (Carol)
Rachel McAdams (Spotlight)
Alicia Vikander (The Danish Girl)
Kate Winslet (Steve Jobs)
 
Who Will Win: Alicia Vikander
Who Could Win: Kate Winslet
 
Anyone of these actresses could win the award for her performance. Both Jennifer Jason Leigh and Rachel McAdams are surrounded by men in their movies and stand equal if not above some of their co-stars. Alicia Vikander, who was also pretty amazing in Ex-Machina turned out the most powerful performance of the five nominees, and deserves to win because of that. But I didn’t even realize Kate Winslet was the character she portrayed until the credits rolled. And a big name transforming herself to hide in plain sight is an increasingly rare skill to see in Hollywood. I was more impressed with Winslet, but the more emotionally powerful performance came from The Danish Girl.
 
Best Actress:
Cate Blanchett (Carol)
Brie Larson (Room)
Jennifer Lawrence (Joy) 
Charlotte Rampling (45 Years)
Saoirse Ronan (Brooklyn)
 
Who Will Win: Brie Larson
Who Could Win: Saoirse Ronan

Brie Larson and Saoirse Ronan are two of the brightest stars in Hollywood, and the main reasons their respective movies were nominated for Best Picture. Both Brooklyn and Room are easily in my top 10 favorite movies of the year. Brooklyn moved me to tears on more than one occasion, and her character’s evolution was stirring and believable. But Brie Larson’s character’s fluctuation from caring mom to desperate prisoner required more range to come off as believable.  That range is probably why Larson will win, but if I am being honest with myself I liked what Ronan did with her character more; probably because I’m a sap.
 
Who do you think will win?  Next up we will look at the men competing for acting glory.

Up until a couple years ago, the person who won Best Director almost always won Best Picture, and while not always a guarantee anymore the correlation is still close:
 
BEST DIRECTOR NOMINEES
Tom McCarthy (Spotlight)
Adam McKay (The Big Short)
George Miller (Mad Max: Fury Road)
Alejandro González Iñárritu (The Revenant)
Lenny Abrahamson (Room)

WHO WILL WIN: Alejandro González Iñárritu
WHO SHOULD WIN: George Miller
 
With all due respect to the other nominees in this category, this is a two-man race: George Miller and Alejandro Iñárritu. The other nominated movies are told in a much more straightforward manner than The Revenant and Mad Max.  In terms of getting the most out of his performers, Iñárritu may have a slight edge, as both movies feature Tom Hardy, but Hardy got his own nomination for The Revenant.  However, after Mad Max premiered, Hardy apologized for having doubted George Miller and signed on to play Mad Max again, whereas he hated Iñárritu, and allegedly choked him out on set. Not only that, but Miller didn’t have over 1/3 of his crew quit out of frustration with the working conditions; that should count for something.

In its technical aspects Mad Max is leaps and bounds ahead of The Revenant.  Not only did Miller receive more technical praise from his peers and receive the most guild award nominations, but he was also able to accomplish more on screen. Both directors wanted to shoot their movies in sequence but only Miller did. While there is very little dialogue in both, Miller shows more with less words than Iñárritu, both in terms of themes and visual pop. George Miller took an action movie and made it look so polished that the Academy had to take it seriously, something not even Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight could do. Both men are deserving nominees for what they accomplished on screen, but George Miller is more deserving.