How Television Saved My Life

I knew nothing about Room when I walked in. I knew Brie Larson was playing one of the leads whom I remembered from Trainwreck and Scott Pilgrim vs The World. In some cases not knowing anything is a benefit. I'd not looked up a trailer, though I'd seen a short little synopsis about a young mother stuck in a room with her son. My mind raged from post-apocalyptic horror to indie-flick. None of which rang true in the end. It's a film that has to be seen and it hurts throughout the whole. That's all I can really say, and Brie Larson deserved to be clutching the many awards that slipped into her hands. She was perfection and so was Jacob Tremblay who played her son.

When you think of Oscar winners they usually celebrate Hollywood in some way or the other, besides digging into the same melodramatic groove which is familiar to us all. Recent years the trend has finally turned (like a slow rusty cog, it has got to be said), and what was once an obvious shoehorned winner doesn't get its price. Like Spotlight, nobody could swear it would win, though they hoped. It doesn't glorify the villainy that is talked about, its quiet, its honest, its true. This is a real story, these are real people and victims. The Boston Globe has a little group of journalists who collectively make up a single department called Spotlight  and focus on a story at a time, doing months of research before publishing. When a new editor steps in, there's a bit of fear that Spotlight will get cut, but they're surprised when finding their new editor wants them to pursue a story that has become easily overlooked articles in the newspaper as a whole. It's abou...