Best Picture

Nominees:

 

 

CINECOLA WINNER: "Room"

 

 

Room is a near perfect film. Room is a film that keeps you thinking about its themes. But also keeps you watching as the events unfold. And they unfold freely, in a novel like format, and it's hard to predict what will happen next. It is also a film that handles themes of kidnapping, of abuse, of motherhood and parenthood in general, of childhood, of alienation, of resilience, of strong will. It is inspiring and positive despite its surrounding darkness. It is carefully handled by an incredible filmmaker, Lenny Abrahamson, who is as consistently talented as he is thankfully prolific and versatile. It features excellent performances, the best use of narration in recent memory, a five-year old's viewpoint, who is incidentally also performed by a child in one of the best child performances ever. It makes an organic use of melodrama that is never exaggerated, a solid screenplay by Emma Donoghue based on her own acclaimed novel. It is a film where what is unsaid and remains concealed is just as important as what is revealed and obvious. 

 

Room is ambitious, and despite its grand use of cinematography, there is no technical intrusion to get in the way of the delight and sensibility of the story, as well as a viewer's encouraged interaction. Unlike the other films nominated, it is a film that can be watched over and over. It is a film where there aren't stand-out moments, because every scene is relevant, replicating the natural rhythm of life, through the process of a five-year-old boy's awakening, a second birth. Room should certainly win the 2016 Best Picture Oscar. And hopefully it will. (But probably, it won't).