Oscar Sunday, Super Tuesday: Movies (and campaign) reflect a longing

On Super Tuesday, voters will weigh in on immigration and what really constitutes the construct of "home."

Oscar voters face a similar choice as they consider the eight contenders for Best Picture. "The Revenant" is favored. But regardless of which film prevails, it's the year of the revenant, as each nominee shares its take on the theme of returning.

"Bring Him Home," the promotional poster for "The Martian" implores, and that sentiment speaks to each film. And yet each nominee's notion of "home" differs.

For frontiersman Hugh Glass (Oscar-lock Leonardo DiCaprio), home is the wilderness, which is being stolen from American Indians. For astronaut Mark Watney (nominee Matt Damon), it isn't the American frontier, but the final frontier: space. While the venues vary, the heroes are quite familiar archetypes: Rugged individualists intrepidly (and ingeniously, in "The Martian") returning after being left for dead by comrades.

There's also abundant heroism in one of this (or any) year's most moving films, "Room." Not by iconic individualists, but from an unlikely duo of a mom (likely Best Actress Brie Larson) and her 5-year-old boy during and after captivity in a one-room shed. The setting is distinctly different, too — not Big Sky country or deep space, but at least for much of the film, a claustrophobic room. "Love Knows No Boundaries," the movie's tagline reads, suggesting home is a bond as much as a building.

The focus of "Spotlight" is children imperiled in their home parishes. The film tells the story of Boston Globe investigative reporters and editors who revealed how intertwined institutions concealed the Catholic Church's sexual abuse scandal. The Globe's reporting won a Pulitzer Prize, and "Spotlight" might rightly win an Academy Award. Already it's a refreshing reminder about the power — and necessity — of the press in an era when "the media" are often excoriated.

"The Big Short" also involves home — or at least mortgages, and the housing bubble that triggered the Great Recession. As depicted, it was only detected by a handful of inquisitive investors who saw shady Wall Street operators and gutless government regulators hiding in plain sight.

Of course, the "Bridge of Spies" era looks quaint compared to the post-nuclear, environmentally devastated dystopia of "Mad Max: Fury Road," which captures concerns some harbor that everyone's home — Earth — is imperiled by possible man-made catastrophes.

While each of the eight great films vying for Best Picture has some version of these key themes, "Brooklyn" is the best representation. It's the story of Eilis, a young Irish immigrant (nominee Saoirse Ronan), who's torn between 1950s New York and her old world. While nearly every aspect of "Brooklyn" is well-scripted and beautifully shot, one scene sears: A horribly homesick Eilis serves similarly lonely Irish immigrants — described as hardworking men who helped build a great city — at a holiday dinner, and breaks down as one sings a soulful Irish ballad. Concurrently heart-wrenching and heartwarming, this is the kind of cinematic magic that encapsulates the complex concepts of "returning" and "home." And in many ways, it's a perfect coda to a time when scorn, not sympathy, is all too often the prevailing response to immigrants.

"Home is home," Eilis' fiancé tells her. But he could just as well be talking to viewers, and even voters, contemplating this complicated year of the revenant.