Spotlight

Once more, the Academy chose the safe and traditional route, as it did the year before in giving Eddie Redmayne the Best Actor Oscar for playing a cripple. This is a perfectly good movie, and I liked it a lot, but it is not the best picture of the year, and I haven’t even seen The Revenant or Brooklyn yet. I would put it below The Big Short, Mad Max: Fury Road, The Martian, and Room, and ahead of only Bridge of Spies. No question, the story of how the Boston Globe dragged the Catholic Church, kicking and screaming and denying and lashing out, from its sewer of denial, lying, and enabling of child molesters and into the light of day is a good one. But it has nothing new to offer me. It is just like a hundred stories of reporters exposing evil.

Editorial aside: It is depressing to realize that hardly anybody ever suffered any consequences from all the revelations. America’s prisons should by now be so full of priests, bishops, archbishops, and yes, even cardinals, that the black, Chicano, and Nazi gangs would quail and step aside when they saw the Clerical Collar Mafia come strolling through the yard. Instead, Cardinal Law was forced to step down … and then landed a cushy job in the fucking Vatican itself. (Does the Vatican have altar boys? Did Pope Benedick XVI grease their assholes for the cardinal?) But the stories did do some good, damn it. No longer can the Church maintain that it is without sin. Everybody knows now that it was (and hell, maybe still is, for all I know) a haven for frustrated homosexual pedophiles. My reaction is … duuuh! What did you expect when you require men to totally repress their sexual urges?