Dimon Kendrick-Holmes: Oscars spotlight should shine on 'Spotlight'

I think "Spotlight" should win Best Picture at the Academy Awards.

Sure I do.

Maybe that's because I'm a newspaper editor.

Maybe if I were a hedge fund manager, I'd be pulling for "The Big Short." Or an astronaut, "The Martian." Or an insurance lawyer defending a spy, "Bridge of Spies."

Or a female Irish immigrant, "Brooklyn." Or an apocalypse survivor, "Mad Max: Fury Road." Or a child spending the first five years of his life in a single room, "Room."

Or a fur trapper and frontiersman, "The Revenant." That is, if I hadn't first been killed by a bear. Or forgot to warm myself inside a dead horse.

But I'm a journalist, and I confess I found it thrilling when reporters in "Spotlight" were sprinting down courtroom halls and editors were talking to lawyers about getting documents unsealed.

And I got kind of misty-eyed, at the end, when the newspapers were rolling off the press and being loaded onto trucks by dawn's early light.

All through the movie, the dialogue of editors and reporters and sources rang true.

In one scene, Marty Baron, the new editor of the Boston Globe, meets the archbishop of Boston for the first time.

The archbishop, Cardinal Law, likens Boston to a small town and then says, "I find that the city flourishes when its great institutions work together."

Baron thinks for a second and says, "Personally I'm of the opinion that for a paper to best perform its function it really needs to stand alone."

That sets the tone for the movie.

Late in the film, the investigative Spotlight team is preparing to publish its story of the cover-up of sexual abuse within the Roman Catholic Church. A fixer for the church meets Walter "Robby" Robinson, the Spotlight editor, in a bar and tells him that Baron is just using the story to propel himself to bigger things.

"Marty Baron is just trying to make his mark, gonna be here for a few years and then he's gonna move on," he tells Robinson, Boston born and bred and a lapsed Catholic. "Where you gonna go?"

Robinson responds: "This is how it happens, isn't it, Pete?"

"What's that?" the fixer says.

"A guy leans on a guy and suddenly the whole town just looks the other way."

Liev Schreiber, the actor

who played Baron, told Entertainment Weekly that he loved the "Spotlight" script when he first read it, but that he "was worried about it as a film."

Why?

"Because," he said, "you kind of hope that people still have appetites for that kind of story -- as you also hope that people still have appetites for long-lead investigative journalism."

The movie didn't last long here in Columbus, and grossed about $38 million at the box office, compared to $228 million for "The Martian," $166 million for "The Revenant" and about $154 million for "Mad Max: Fury Road."

"Spotlight" was released on DVD on Tuesday.

It should win, and more people should see it.

But maybe that's just me.

Dimon Kendrick-Holmes, executive editor, dkholmes@ledger-enquirer.com.

This story was originally published February 26, 2016 at 8:46 PM with the headline "Dimon Kendrick-Holmes: Oscars spotlight should shine on 'Spotlight' ."