Watching Oscars Will Be Very Personal This Year, Because I’m in ‘spotlight’

By Martin Baron
Washington Post
February 24, 2016

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Most years I try to stay attentive, or at least awake, through the Academy Awards. Most years I fail.

On Sunday, however, fatigue has an overwhelming counterweight — obvious self-interest. Plus, I will be sitting inside the Dolby Theatre.

“Spotlight” brought to the big screen the first six months of a Boston Globe investigation that in 2002 revealed a decades-long cover-up of serial sexual abuse by priests within the Boston Archdiocese.

Liev Schreiber portrays me as the newly arrived top editor who launched that investigation, and his depiction has me as a stoic, humorless, somewhat dour character that many professional colleagues instantly recognize (“He nailed you”) and that my closest friends find not entirely familiar.

The scandal disclosed by the Globe’s Spotlight investigative team ultimately took on worldwide dimensions. Fourteen years later, the Catholic Church continues to answer for how it concealed grave wrongdoing on a massive scale and for the adequacy of its reforms, as it should.

The movie has been nominated for six Oscars, including best picture. And, journalistic objectivity be damned, I’m hoping it wins the entire lot. I feel indebted to everyone who made a film that captures, with uncanny authenticity, how journalism is practiced and, with understated force, why it’s needed.