Unofficial Academy Awards Discussion Board

It's true that the difficulties encountered by the filmmakers has driven the narrative for The Revenant and without them we might be looking at a different race. However, if you look back at the roster of Oscar winners from the beginning, it has quite often been the film that seemed to have been the most difficult to make that won the award. There have been obvious exceptions, of course, like The Apartment over The Alamo, Tom Jones over Cleopatra and The Sound of Music over Doctor Zhivago, but from Wings to Cimarron to Mutiny on the Bounty to Gone With the Wind to The Greatest Show on Earth to Around the World in 80 Days to Ben-Hur to Lawrence of Arabia to Patton to The Deer Hunter to Gandhi to Out of Africa to Schindler's List to Braveheart to Titanic to Gladiator to Crash, some good, some not so good, it has often been the film that had the perceived toughest shoot that won.

While I can't think of a single instance where an actor whining about how difficult it was to film a movie for which he was compensated millions of dollars, there have been plenty examples of actors and actresses winning for suffering for their art including last year's best actor winner and he didn't have the "due" card to play.

The film will almost certainly win for Best Actor, Direction and Cinematography. The big question is will Best Picture be another 1960 (The Apartment over The Alamo) or 2005 (Crash over Brokeback Mountain). We'll know in about 48 hours.

There's probably some truth to this. So much of its Oscar campaign was based on how difficult the movie was to make, so I definitely think things might be different without that angle.

Here is a thought I have about The Revenant and this year's Oscars. It seems to be that much of The Revenant's success is a result of its campaign that emphasized the arduousness of its filming. What if, instead, The Revenant was filmed on sets in a soundstage along with using blue screen/cgi? An identical film, just made differently, could have had a very different awards fate.