Russell’s “Joy,” a movie for which she’s miscast but in which she nonetheless works wonders. I’m surprised and happy to see Jennifer Lawrence get nominated for her lead role in David O. It’s a masterwork of marketing-which may well be his closest connection to the role of Jobs. I think that Fassbender’s best role isn’t any that he plays onscreen but the one that he plays in the industry: classic leading man, tall and suave and athletic, redolent of energetic virility. Michael Fassbender’s performance as Steve Jobs is flimsy as interpretation but impressive as impersonation. Instead of Oscars, they ought simply to give its director, Tom Hooper (who also made “The King’s Speech” and “Les Misérables”), the mold to make statuettes of his own for his actors. In the Best Actor category, never underestimate the Academy’s prostration before British stage acting and genteel British dramas such as “The Danish Girl” (or simply never bet against Eddie Redmayne). Yet I also underestimated the Academy’s enthusiasm for the supporting performances in “Spotlight” and overestimated the impact of Michael Keaton’s lead performance there. I counted on much more enthusiasm for “99 Homes,” Ramin Bahrani’s drama about a young man who, after his family loses its home in the subprime-mortgage crisis, takes a job with the banker who foreclosed on it I didn’t figure on the wind being diverted from the film’s sails to those of “The Big Short,” which, I think, is the one movie that has a chance of pipping “Spotlight” at the post.
Regarding acting, I made a category error-I figured that Christian Bale would get a Best Actor nomination for his performance in “The Big Short” in fact, he got one for Best Supporting Actor.
It’s a distortion that, in effect, filters out the blackness from Coogler’s remarkable drama about the modes and ironies of black American experience and reduces the film to “Rocky 7.” That distortion says much about the Academy-much that the Academy wouldn’t like to acknowledge about itself. But the Academy’s choice of no one but Stallone to represent “Creed” at the awards-no Jordan and no Ryan Coogler, who wrote and directed it, and, for that matter, no Maryse Alberti, whose distinctively agile cinematography is integral to the movie’s emotional impact-is a grotesque distortion of the viewing experience. I agree that Sylvester Stallone gave a hearty, worldly-wise performance as the aged Rocky Balboa, and thought that he’d be one of the few intersections between my own year-end picks and the nominations. PHOTOGRAPH FROM 20TH CENTURY FOX FILM CORP / EVERETT Leonardo DiCaprio in “The Revenant.” His performance was among those nominated for a 2016 Oscar.