What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 2015

The Year: 2015
What the Nominees Were: The Big Short, Bridge of Spies, Brooklyn, Mad Max: Fury Road, The Martian, The Revenant, Room, Spotlight
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: I got nothing. It was a weak year.

What Did Win: Spotlight
How It’s Aged: It’s fine. A respectful treatment of a worthy topic. But it feels like a TV-movie, if that identification still means anything. An episode of “Law and Order” from 20 years earlier covered the same topic with more bite.

What Should’ve Won: Mad Max: Fury Road
How Hard Was the Decision: Hard, because there were no shoo-in candidates this year (if only I could move Selma by a year!) Normally, I would say that this movie would have no chance at Best Picture, but it did get a Picture nomination and a boatload of wins in other categories, so I’ll declare that it was possible.

Director: George Miller
Writers: Miller, Brendan McCarthy and Nico Lathouris
Stars: Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult, Hugh Keays-Byrne

The Story: In a post-apocalyptic hellscape, drifter Mad Max gets kidnapped and turned into a hood-ornament. He fights his way free and joins Furiosa, a war leader who has rebelled in an attempt to rescue the evil leader’s five wives. They all chase each other back and forth across the desert.

Any Nominations or Wins: It won Costume Design, Editing, Makeup and Hairstyling, Production Design, Sound Editing and Sound Mixing. It lost Picture, Director, Cinematography and Visual Effects.
Why It Didn’t Win: Clearly the Academy loved this movie, but it was just too unthinkable to give a slam-bang gonzo movie like this the big award. Spotlight was a worthy topic, so it eked out a win despite being rather forgettable.

Why It Should Have Won:

1. This is probably the most exciting action movie ever made. I exercise to movies on my elliptical runner and I never need much convincing to throw this one on for another five spectacular workouts. And yet, the movie could not be more emotionally satisfying (more so than Raiders, the only other action movie on my list.) It’s an adrenaline-fest that also doubles as a feminist manifesto.
   
2. Charlize Theron’s astonishing performance dominates the movie, but can we talk about how great Nicholas Hoult always is? He almost steals the movie as a goon-turned-good. (As I write this, he’s up for the role of James Bond, which would be shocking casting, but I think he could pull it off.)
   
3. Legendary comic book artist Brendan McCarthy (Judge Dredd, Zenith) is credited as a co-screenwriter because he helped make 3500 storyboards that essentially served as the movie’s screenplay. This is not remembered as a “comic book movie”, but it is, more literally than most. The result is a kind of visually kinetic storytelling that most action movies only dream of.
   
4. Often you watch a movie like this and say, “this movie is awesome because it feels really gnarly and like all of these people making the film are putting themselves in danger,” and then you find out afterwards that someone actually died during filming it and you feel awful. But thankfully that’s not the case here. Amazingly, though the danger was very real, things seem to have been run entirely safely, so you can enjoy it as much as you want. (They do get you to worry at one point in the doc that someone has been killed, but it turns out it was just a dummy that got its head sheared off.) This is all the more astonishing because the movie clearly uses very little CGI and staged all the stunts practically (They basically just used CGI to digitally remove all the safety harnesses)
5. All four Mad Max movies are well worth watching, but there are various reasons that none of the previous three got close to the list. One is the undercurrent of homophobia in those movies. This movie kept the villains scary without the element of leather-man-panic that sours the others.