What 'Spotlight' Won Best Picture For: The Globe's Reporting on a Cover-Up

Tom McCarthy's Spotlight took Best Picture at the 2016 Academy Awards. Variety notes the ensemble — Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams and Mark Ruffalo — and that the film's praise went to the way it chronicled the Boston Globe's investigative reporting, the work that exposed the Catholic Church's systemic cover-up of sexual abuse of children by priests. It is a drama built on journalism rather than a whodunit, and the antagonist is an institution rather than one monster, which is roughly the hardest thing to put on screen. A cover-up that is systemic has no convenient confession scene; praise for the chronicle, rather than for a twist, is praise for a film that trusted viewers to stay interested in how knowledge gets assembled.