There are now five opinion-spreaders who’ve argued that Spider-Man: No Way Home should have been nominated for the Best Picture Oscar — myself (two months ago), Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman, Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone, Jimmy Kimmel and Kevin Smith.
In a 2.12 Variety essay Gleiberman has dug into an issue related to the Spider-Man thing. It’s titled “Why Jimmy Kimmel Is Right About the Oscars.”
Key passage: “The Academy Awards, even as they seem to be discovering a new kind of ‘integrity,’ could end up withering on the cross of that integrity.
“Today, the Oscars reflect an increasingly dichotomized thinking: small movies (good) vs. popular movies (not so good), movies that wear their art on their sleeve (good) vs. movies that just want to have fun (not so good).
HE interjection: Since the woke thing took hold in ’17, Academy members have favored smallish films, true, but especially those that seem culturally meaningful (signifying some form of social awareness or advancement) or emotionally touching in a socially-healing way.
The last five winners: Nomadland (dispossessed nomads, living hand to mouth, shitting in buckets), Parasite (rich vs. poor, social hostility, a director of color, wasn’t another Scorsese goombah film), Green Book (a parent-child road movie, racial rapprochement in 1962), The Shape of Water (great fish sex for homely woman vs. Michael Shannon rage and perversity), Moonlight (three stages in the life of a gay black dude + “ohh, that handjob on the beach!”).
Back to Gleiberman: “That thinking is there on the part of both the media and the Academy voters. Even King Richard, one of the 10 best picture nominees (and one that’s likely to bring Will Smith his first Oscar for best actor), may, at this point, be too conventional and wholehearted for the Academy. I was happy to see it nominated (I think, after Drive My Car, that it’s the best film on the slate), but a decade ago I believe it would have won. Why isn’t it being talked about as a contender?
“It’s hard to generalize about the Oscars — whenever you point to a trend, there’s probably some example from the past that can be used to contradict it. But what my gut says, along with Jimmy Kimmel’s, is that what most of the world thinks of as the quintessence of entertainment is starting to be something the Academy no longer trusts.
“If so, that’s a serious problem. As a night of showbiz, the Oscars should be a lot of things: traditional and audacious, intimate and spectacular, frivolous and sincere.
“The one thing they shouldn’t be is alienating.”
