CALIFORNIA
Los Angeles Times
Steven Zeitchik
Like moms and your friend with the garage band, there’s no surer way to speak to the souls of journalists than to tell them no one appreciates them the way you do. Who doesn’t want to be told they’re better than people give them credit for?
Such was the strategy this season in the race for Oscar best picture, of all places, where “Spotlight” has made a strong case ahead of Sunday’s show.
Tom McCarthy’s deftly executed film — a story about reporters — used reporters to tell its story to reporters. The message they delivered was simple: Journalism has become an undervalued profession, and this movie was here to correct that.
Since it rolled out nearly six months ago, the campaign for the Open Road release has needed to follow a unique path. The low-key procedural abut how Boston Globe reporters slowly unearthed the story of Catholic Church sex abuse and the conspiracy to cover it up was initially in a tough spot. The film was about a subject uncomfortable at worst and process-based at best, and about a profession that can be, well, let’s just say not super-cinematic to watch on the big screen.
So the campaign made the groundbreaking journalism the thing. Any fact-based movie is keen to trot out the real-life personalities, especially if they’re heroic. But “Spotlight” — one of three front-runners to win best picture prize on Sunday, along with “The Revenant” and “The Big Short” — had the added benefit of having many of its personalities available and appealing. (It also made the heroic survivors of the sex abuse a focal point of coverage.)
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