Spotlight, which so far has won the Best Picture Award from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association (LAFCA) and the National Society of Film Critics (NSFC) , centers on the 2001 investigation into the Catholic Church by The Boston Globe Spotlight team, a four-person investigative unit.

McCarthy elaborated: “In 2001, newspapers were at the height of their power. This was before the crash of 2005-2006, so we don’t really deal with where we are now, we just sort of show by example when things worked, and this investigation worked extremely well.”

The film doesn’t editorialize on new media versus legacy journalism: “We just said we’ll show by example what it is and hope during discussion follows afterwards that people would say, ‘Where are we now?’ Which is, it’s pretty dire, the journalism industry.”
While the subject of the Catholic Church investigation deals with the difficult subject of pedophilia, McCarthy said there’s no reason to be uncomfortable with the film. “The survivors they were sitting with at this point had come forward 20, 30 years later, so we’re meeting men, particularly, in their 30s and 40s, who were now coming forth with their stories,” the filmmaker said.
“There are a couple scenes when we see children, but we never see the acts, so it wasn’t really about that; it wasn’t relative to the story or the reporters’ experience.”