Spotlight - Haven't watched The Revenant yet, but of the other best picture nominees I've seen (Bridge of Spies, The Martian. Mad Max Fury Road (how this snuck in beats me), and The Big Short, this would have been the one I would have picked (over The Big Short). Tough to watch story about the last great investigation by an American newspaper. At the end, they list all the places outside of Boston that were infected. Pretty stunning. Mitchell Garabedian just won another settlement from the RC Church yesterday, so it's still topical.
The Big Short - I have a lot of experience with this issue and this movie does as good a job as possible tackling a very hard to understand issue for laymen. Still spent a lot of time walking my wife through what was happening though. The blond in the bathtub scene is important because the impetus for the greatest financial disaster of our time was Wall Street's voracious demand for mortgage loans to package into derivatives, slap a bogus AAA rating on these mortgage-backed-securities, and sell them all over the world. Except Wall Street ran out of good loans to sell and didn't know it. The movie also gives lie to the conservative narrative that it was enforced lending to minorities that was the cause of the crisis. A despicable lie to cover up the inability of capitalism to regulate itself, though there are plenty of parties that share the blame. (Just to be balanced, Dodd-Franks is a POS, and a vote against the bailout like Sanders' ideological knee-jerk response against Wall Street would have been cratered the economy to Great Depression levels.)
Bridge of Spies - Very good movie, though not in the class of the two above. Hanks, the Coen brothers, Spielberg - how wrong can you go? Mark Rylance deservedly won best supporting actor. Far easier to digest than the other two movies above.