Real Estate Oscars

Statuettes and Subprimes

By Cutright Elizabeth on Feb 25, 2016 in News

“Mortgage-backed securities; sub-prime loans, tranches; it’s pretty confusing right?” Ryan Gosling asks the audience early on in The Big Short. “Well, it’s supposed to be. Wall Street loves to use confusing terms to make you think only they can do what they do… So here’s Margot Robbie in a bubble bath to explain.”

At once, the film cuts to Ms. Robbie as she sips champagne while quickly and easily – with just a smidgen of profanity – details the intricacies of mortgage bonds and subprime lending.

The Big Short, based on the nonfiction book by Michael Lewis, has grabbed a handful of Oscar nominations, including best film. The Oscar nods put the final shine on a year’s worth of accolades, from the Golden Globes to BAFTA to a seemingly endless array of critics’ choice acknowledgements and guild awards. With dashes of wit, energy, and unexpected humor, The Big Short manages to distill and illuminate the causes and outcome of one of the largest financial catastrophes in US history. In doing so, the film also manages to shine a lite on the intricate, sometimes confounding, world of real estate development and financing.

While The Big Short does a commendable job of pulling the viewer into the nuts and bolts behind Wall Street’s disastrous interlude with B-paper loans and unmonitored trading, the film is not the first cinematic foray the subprime calamity. In preparation of Sunday’s Academy Award telecast, here is our list of the top five award-winning films – from documentaries to thrillers – that highlight the winners, losers and puppet-masters behind the mortgage default catastrophe.

99 Homes (2015)

Overshadowed by The Big Short when it debuted in 2015, critics immediately hailed 99 Homes for its harrowing depiction of the impact the housing debacle had on individual homeowners. In the film, construction worker plays Dennis Nash, recently evicted for failing to pay his mortgage himself faced with a devil’s bargain when a “gun-toting real estate broker” offers him a job evicting families like his as part of a high-stakes scam involving the banks and the government. Though the film failed to secure a 2015 Oscar nod, it made a respectable run of the award season gauntlet, nabbing nominations from the Golden Globes, the Screen Actors Guild, and the Venice Film Festival, along with recognition of a variety of film critics association including Toronto, San Francisco, Vancouver and Los Angeles.

The Big Short (2015)

As mentioned above, The Big Short takes an anecdotal look at the 2008 financial crisis from the perspective of a few key players who managed to parlay their anticipation of the housing crash into billions of dollars for themselves and their clients. The all-star cast includes Brad Pitt, Christian Bale, Ryan Gosling and Steve Carrell as “Wall Street outsiders” who realized the bubble would soon burst and took a chance at making a bundle on the nation’s economic cataclysm. Nominated for best picture, the film’s director, and the screenplay are also in the running for a gold statuette along with Bale for Best Supporting Actor.

The Queen of Versailles (2012)

Oh, how the mighty have fallen! This 2010 documentary began as a feature-length reality show focusing on a wealthy Florida family’s attempt to build a 90,000-square-foot mega-mansion inspired by the Palace of Versailles. The Siegels made their fortune during the housing bubble, and as the collapse crushes their bank account and leaves them scrambling for funding, the documentary becomes a “rebuke of real estate excess” and “a unique portrait of a once wealthy family struggling to navigate economic collapse.” Though the documentary failed to make the cut at the 2013 Oscars, the film won Best Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival and earned the award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Documentary from the Directors Guild of America.

Margin Call (2011)

This “financial thriller” follows a group of Wall Street investment bankers over a 36-hour period as they strategize and scheme in the hours before the housing market implodes. With a roster that includes Kevin Spacey, Stanley Tucci and Demi Moore, the film is less a textbook synopsis of what took places in the weeks before the collapse and more of a powerful rumination on culpability, corruption, and the nature of Wall Street’s high-stakes environment. Nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay in 2012, the film also won Best Debut Director from the National Board of Review.

Inside Job (2010)

Released just two years after the housing bubble burst, this 2010 documentary explains how the consolidation of power on Wall Street combined with a lack of oversight by federal regulators created the housing bubble and its inevitable demise. Narrated by Matt Damon, the film won Best Documentary at the 2010 Academy Awards. Not for the faint of heart, Fortune Magazine called the movie “a scathing indictment of the U.S. financial industry.” In a depressing footnote to the film, in his acceptance speech director Charles Ferguson lamented the fact no one behind the disaster had gone to jail as a result of their malfeasance.

Bonus: Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House

After subjecting yourself to hours of film about default swaps and subprime lending, you’ll be in need of a palate cleanser, and Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House is a worth tonic for your troubled soul. While not technically about the most recent mortgage fiasco, this 1948 film starring Cary Grant and Myrna Loy is a delightful romp through the vagaries of home ownership and the American postwar flight to the suburbs. Crowded into a small Manhattan apartment, the Blandings decide to take the plunge and ditch their NYC digs for a rural fixer-upper in the Connecticut countryside.

In the grand tradition of all madcap comedies, everything that can go wrong does, as the family blunders through renovations, unexpectedly complicated commutes, and all the headaches associated with moving into a 200-year-old farmhouse. With costs rising and miscommunication escalating, the Blandings find themselves at a crossroads – do they cut their losses and head back to their affordable, though cramped, urban homestead? Or do they stick it out, and hang on to their country dream home?