“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...