The end of the year is near, so both critics and audience are picking their favorites for the most prestigious award in the film industry. The next, 94th Academy Awards ceremony will be held on March 27, 2022, and nominations will be announced on February 8, 2022.
Many movies from many different genres won the Academy Award. However, Marvel movies weren’t really nominated for the most important awards. One exception was Black Panther, Ryan Coogler’s MCU movie which was nominated for seven Oscars, including Best Picture. The movie won three Oscars (Best Costume Design, Best Original Score, and Best Production Design), which makes it the first MCU (and only so far) movie that ever won an Oscar.
James Mangold’s Logan was nominated for the Best Adapted Screenplay back in 2018, which makes it the first live-action superhero movie to be nominated for the screenwriting award. Still, most of the other Marvel films, if they were nominated for Oscars, were nominated for Best Visual Effects (ten MCU movies were nominated for that award) or some other technical award, like Sound Mixing.
With Black Panther being the only MCU movie that ever won an Oscar and the only MCU movie that was nominated for Best Picture, could MCU movies get more recognition in the future? Well, several people that worked on the newest MCU movie — Spider-Man: No Way Home — believe so.
“This is a big picture on the big screen at a moment when the big screen experience is fighting for its life. This is a chance for the Academy to strike a blow for the big screen. This is why they expanded the best picture category to 10 films, for exactly this circumstance.” — Tom Rothman, chairman of Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group for The Hollywood Reporter
“Just because they’re a certain kind of genre doesn’t mean they’re not quality movies. We all got in this business to make movies that people want to see, that make people feel things, and I think this movie legitimately does that.” — Amy Pascal for The Hollywood Reporter
“I think both of these types of films deserve recognition. It’s a good thing when people are in a theater and they stand up and cheer. It’s a good thing when people are wiping tears because they’re thinking back on their last 20 years of moviegoing and what it has meant to them. That, to me, is a very good thing — the sort of thing the Academy was founded, back in the day, to recognize.” — Kevin Feige for The Hollywood Reporter
It was recently announced that No Way Home managed to get on the shortlist for the next Academy Awards in the categories of Effects and Sound. Three other MCU movies, Black Widow, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, and Eternals were shortlisted to be nominated for Best Visual Effects as well. It’s not a surprise if any of these movies receive a nomination for the Best Visual Effects, but it seems like people behind No Way Home aim higher than that.
Spider-Man: No Way Home holds the score of 94% on Rotten Tomatoes, and the average rating of 9.0 on IMDb. The movie is playing in theaters now.
