I always watch the Academy Awards, and if they run long I don’t care; but Sunday night was the first time I felt I had skin in the game. When Spotlight was named best picture, I hollered; so did my wife. But to my surprise, before the night was over I was on Facebook defending Spotlight against a journalist who thought it wasn’t “half as good a movie” as All the President’s Men.
In 2001, as the newspaper industry was collapsing, the Boston Globe took on the local Catholic Church. Many of the reporters were Catholics. They worked carefully and mournfully, and among their motivations was shame at not having done this work already. The crime they pursued wasn’t politics—it was pedophilia! Its culprits weren’t pols—they were priests! No doubt an Ingmar Bergman could have added stirring “wrestling with God” symbolism that in some critics’ eyes would have nailed down the case for Oscar. But sin doesn’t need gilding with poetry.
