Moving on, we have Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s outstanding survival epic The Revenant, which dominated this year’s Oscar nominations with 12 nods. Right there you can tell that several branches really liked the film, grabbing it unexpected nominations in places like Best Supporting Actor (Tom Hardy didn’t even receive a SAG nod) and Best Production Design (surprising because most of the film takes place in the wilderness of nature). So why would The Revenant winning Best Picture be a pretty big surprise? Well, this time there are a few reasons why it would be a pretty big shock.
For starters, the film didn’t win a single Best Picture award until it surprised everyone at the Golden Globes this year by winning Best Picture (Drama). The critics’ awards had been dominated by Spotlight and Mad Max: Fury Road, so to see it suddenly take Best Picture from a major group like the HFPA was rather shocking.
However, as I’ve been obligated to point out, there have been several Oscar winners for Best Picture that did not triumph at the Golden Globes in recent years, including Birdman, The King’s Speech, The Hurt Locker, No Country for Old Men, The Departed and Crash. It could just as easily mean that the film is more popular than initially thought, with the commanding 12 Oscar nods being possible proof, but it could also mean that the HFPA simply wanted to go their own way, or perhaps make up for not awarding Inarritu and his film (Birdman) last year.
However, the main reasons as to why The Revenant winning Best Picture would be rather shocking are that it not only failed to get a Best Adapted Screenplay nod from the Academy, but it also failed to get a Best Cast nod from SAG. I think we can all agree that the film’s screenplay was not its strongest element, so it doesn’t really come as a surprise that no one has been nominating it, but it still hurts the movie in a pretty major way in that most of the time a Best Picture winner’s script is at least nominated.
The obvious example to pull out here is Titanic, whose screenplay was not nominated, but still managed to go on and win Best Picture (among ten other awards). The Revenant is very similar in that it’s a big epic that is more noteworthy for how it’s made and the power of its story rather than its screenplay, so this might not be as big a deal as people think, but still, the Academy tends to favor the best writing most of the time, so it’s certainly a drawback.
The Academy also tends to favor films that feature an ensemble of actors, which The Revenant doesn’t particularly qualify for, especially since most of the film is Leonardo DiCaprio simply trying to survive in the wilderness all alone. With that in mind, it didn’t come as a surprise to anyone when the film failed to receive a nomination for Best Cast from SAG. In the history of the SAG awards, there has only been one time when a film did not get a nomination for this category, but still went on to win Best Picture, and that just happened to be the very first year that the award was handed out, resulting in Braveheart being snubbed there and still winning Best Picture at the Oscars.
Now, you could argue that, duh, the film wasn’t going to receive a Best Cast nomination, but it could still win Best Picture if the Academy likes it enough. This is true, but it has shown to be exceedingly rare, and hasn’t happened since the onset of the award. It winning without the nomination would be phenomenal and would truly be against all odds. Still, it could happen.
What concerns me is that, given that that’s a longshot at best, adding onto it the fact that it also has to win with no screenplay nomination makes it seem like a complete impossibility. The Revenant would literally have to pull a Braveheart AND Titanic victory at once to take the crown, which seems highly unlikely. However, they clearly loved the film, showering it with 12 nominations, so perhaps lightning will indeed strike twice.