The nominations for the 94th Academy Awards were announced earlier this week, and as usual, it sent the internet into a frenzy of discussion about which movies should or should not have been nominated, and what makes a film worthy of nomination in the first place. The Best Picture nominations were the area where most of this contention happened, as usual. The main point of discussion was a lot of people’s disdain for the Academy only nominating “prestige” films that weren’t seen or enjoyed by a lot of the general public rather than recognizing movies that were box office hits.
In particular, a lot ofMarvel fans were upsetthatSpider-Man: No Way Homewasn’t nominated for Best Picture despite being one of the biggest movie events of the year. They were arguing that this was a “snub” and that the Academy is pretentious because it doesn’t want to acknowledge superhero movies as “real cinema.” However, this is a reductive view to take, and though it would be nice for the Academy to branch out a bit with their nominations, a movie not receiving an awards nomination does not suddenly make it objectively bad.
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First of all, the Academy absolutely does have a history of being very limited in what they consider to be eligible for the Oscars, which has led to a lack of diversity in the nominees (as well as in the Academy itself as a whole). A lot of people in the industry will look down on the more popular box office releases and claim that they’re not worthy of the same regard as other films because they aren’t “art” in the same way. This is a problem, for sure, and it would be great to seethe Academy broaden their horizonsa little bit.
However, this does not mean that they’re always wrong. Like it or not, there are markers ofwhat makes a piece of media objectively good or bad(regardless of whether someone personally likes it or not), and the films that utilize those elements to make a truly good piece of art should perhaps be recognized more than a franchise movie that was mostly just made to be a cash cow. This isn’t to say that popular movies aren’t well-made or don’t have good elements, because there are many that do, but there’s starting to be a problem at the box office with only franchise or sequel movies being made because that’s what sells, and it’s limiting the opportunity to release really interesting or thought-provoking films that might be considered “pretentious” and won’t do well commercially.
WithNo Way Homespecifically, it’s a bit of a reach to say that it not getting an Oscar nomination means that it’s “not getting the recognition it deserves.“Spider-Man: No Way Homemight have beenmore recognized than any other movie in 2021, bringing in massive box office numbers and being the biggest cinematic event sinceAvengers: Endgame. It’s perplexing why some fans need the validation of the Academy, as though this movie that they love will be ruined if the Oscars don’t give it awards. The Academy is just one group of people who work in the film industry; they’re not the be-all and end-all of taste.
Many fans will make the case that theNo Way Home"snub” proves that the Academy has something against superhero movies and thinks that they’re all total trash. However, this is a hard claim to make whenBlack PantherandJokerhave both recently garnered Best Picture nominations. Would it be great if the Academy started recognizing superhero movies more, and particularly the acting performances in them? Of course, but it would also be great if superhero movies always made an effort to be…good. Marvel movies, in particular, have become very formulaic (with anything that falls outside of that formula getting punished by fans,like what happened withEternals), and it would be great to see them really put effort into making the scripts and the cinematography good, and not just doing the bare minimum of what’s expected for a blockbuster.
People put a lot of stock into the Oscar nominations, and rightfully so. Often,the winners of certain categorieswill get more career opportunities now that their careers have been recognized, and the movies that win and are nominated for Best Picture often have a hand in what trajectory movies take for the next few years. However, once again, the Oscars aren’t everything. Just because a movie wasn’t nominated for Best Picture doesn’t automatically mean it was a bad movie. There are plenty of great movies that were released in 2021 that didn’t get a nomination, and there are even movies that did get nominated that many would argue aren’t that great. While the Oscars are one way of determining quality in film, it’s not the final word on what makes a movie good or enjoyable.
Spider-Man: No Way Homewas good, certainly better than many expected with the heavy amounts of fan service that are in the movie. However, the fact that it wasn’t nominated for Best Picture doesn’t mean that the Academy was pointing fingers at it and saying “Don’t watch this, it’s terrible!”. The Oscars can often be a place where movies that had smaller releases (whether it’s due to their subject matter or the fact that it’s a foreign film) can get some recognition amongst the general public, and maybe convince people to watch these movies that they wouldn’t have otherwise seen. The MCU is already popular enough, andNo Way Homedoesn’t exactly need recognition from the Academy to get its name out there. It was beloved by fans, and gave them theSpider-Manmovie that they’ve been craving from the MCU for years. Maybe, in the end, that’s enough.
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