This won Best Picture?

Rating: 5/10 (1 April 2016)

Spotlight has two main things going for it. A very strong script from Tom McCarthy and Josh Singer that is reminiscent of All The President's Men and the stellar cast made up of Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, Liev Schreiber, Mark Ruffalo, Stanley Tucci, John Slattery and Brian d'Arcy James. But besides all of those 2 great aspects, does Spotlight present itself as the film that deserves the slew of award nominations that it has been slammed with? To me, no.Spotlight seems to be a movie that shows itself as an amazing film but lacks focus on characters and doesn't stretch boundaries for cinema. Does that mean all that praise isn't in the film? No, Spotlight does shine brightly in the script and performances.
Spotlight is based on the true story of the Boston Globe reporters in the Spotlight section that are tasked with finding evidence for a story on the Catholic Church child molestation cases but discover something bigger in the process. The 128 minute film follows the reporters as they come across the victims of these molestations. While others will say Michael Keaton is the standout in this film for me it's Mark Ruffalo giving my personal favorite performance from him. Stanley Tucci, Liev Schreiber, Rachel McAdams and Brian d'Arcy James give great performances that help give the film a bit more shape but sadly it doesn't help that their characters and how they're shown to us are the root of my problem with Spotlight. Spotlight's characters are never given much detail so we don't really feel a personal connection with the reporters like we should because they're the main characters.
The writing in Spotlight is great and definitely deserving of the awards it gets. While the characters are written from a bird's eye view it at least gets us to sympathize with the characters and get us invested in how they discover the conspiracy, I wish the directing were the same. Tom McCarthy is a director that hasn't been able to wow me. This is probably because the last film I saw him direct was The Cobbler, one of the worst films of 2015, and he did the opposite of intrigued me and more or less had me rock in the fetal position and think about the choices I have made in my life. He does an adequate job for a biopic. It's really hard to get me to love a biopic nowadays because they all follow the same movements and never fascinate me. A minor nitpick is that each time something important happens in the movie a few notes from the piano played and it was cute the first time but really made me question as to why that had to be the go to music for those moments.
Spotlight is just another Oscar baity film (a term I hate using but is definitely true in this case) that has a great script with decent direction and outstanding performances from Keaton and Ruffalo. But the lack of depth in the characters just astounds me. Easily could have been directed better if Spielberg had taken helm. I would definitely recommend to watch but not deserving of Best Picture in my mind. It's definitely a great film that should be shown to people who want more info on the scandal.