Did not deserve best picture

Agreed on Spotlight being a good film but slightly overrated. Although I believe Ex Machina should have won best picture, not the Revenant.

Ex Machina is one of those few films that really made me rethink my stance on the development of AI in general, but also the interviews between Ava and Caleb.

The more I think about Spotlight, the less I seem to like it.

It most certainly did deserve best picture. The Revenant wasn't even the second best film of the year. The Big Short was.

In retrospect, I've rewatched all the 2016 Best Picture nominees. While Spotlight would not have been my vote (that would be Room), I think it's a respectable pick and I'm glad it beat The Revenant.

While The Revenant is good, it was also (in my personal opinion) some of the most overrated claptrap I've seen in quite a while. It has some really beautiful cinematography, staggering stuff, but that doesn't make up for the deficiencies practically everywhere else. It's usually a bad sign for me when all the promotion emphasizes how tough the shoot was rather than the story itself (last year it was Boyhood's 'it took 12 years to make', here it is The Revenant's 'they shot it in the cold with natural lighting'). Mad Max Fury Road and Room also had 'stylistic mastery' (even if Room didn't show off about it as much).

The story in The Revenant is just so barebones that it's almost a contradiction given how amazing on a technical level it is.As a survival film, it's lacking. As a revenge film, it's plodding. As an art film, it's incredibly sixth form (Oh look, another rebirth metaphor). Visually its stunning and there's some really good scenes (the bear attack), but there really isn't much to it aside from the audiovisual experience. I just get nothing out of the story and I can’t get invested in it.

The Revenant has many well-composed shots and sequences, and a lot of moody atmosphere, impressionistic style and themes it appears to chew on with regards to survival, purpose and revenge, but it is fundamentally a movie that ends with two guys strangling each other and saying "Killing me won't bring back your son!" It's a pulpy revenge story with high-brow, arthouse pretensions.

Totally agree!!!

Of course it didn't, but then again neither did many Best Picture winners in the last decades. It's an interesting historic documentary, but average as cinema. I guess the Oscar was mainly political.

I agree that it did not deserve best picture. It was good, but I felt like the characters were 2-dimensional for the most part. Not much backstory there, probably because there was not time for it. I think the story would have worked better as a 3-part TV docudrama. I think the story needed more time to be told well. But, yes, I did enjoy the film.

[deleted]