Malvern’s Adam McKay Shoots for an Oscar with ‘The Big Short’

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Adam McKay, a Malvern native--via Victoria Will/Invision/AP.

the-big-short-teaser-posterPraise has been lavish, even by the critics, for Malvern native Adam McKay’s latest move, ‘The Big Short’, with many predicting a possible Oscar win for the director of “Talladega Nights” and “Anchorman. New York magazine’s David Edelstein, has already branded the movie as “one of the best films of the year.”

Based on Michael Lewis’ book “The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine”, it is a nonfiction story that recounts the events that led to the creation of the housing and credit bubble which is widely accredited as the trigger for the financial crisis in 2008.  

While the movie was originally not expected to premiere before next year, Paramount executives decided to push McKay to finish the movie earlier so that it could throw its hat in the ring for this year’s Academy Awards, and as a result the movie should be in theaters this Wednesday.

This has turned out to be a good move, as praise for the star-studded movie just keeps pouring in. In the newspaper column “Oscar Watch”, Los Angeles Times’ reporter, Glenn Whipp, writes that “The Big Short” is “a movie to watch.” He continues to say that the film, which stars Ryan Gosling, Steve Carell, Christian Bale, and Brad Pitt, “illuminates, with clarity and righteous anger, how the subprime mortgage bubble caused the economy to collapse in 2008 and why it might very well happen again. That social currency counts a lot with academy members.”

Variety writes  that with an impressive $720,000 has already been earned from its limited release in eight theaters, and the movie is “now viewed as a leading contender to capture the best picture Oscar nomination.”

However, this limited release is not necessarily a good barometer on how successful the movie will be once it moves on to general release according to Cara Buckley from The New York Times, as she writes that “the real test will be how ‘The Big Short’ fares when it opens in a few thousand theaters on Dec. 23.”

Check out the trailer below.

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