As long as there have been award shows, there have been snubs, and the award show responsible for the most controversy and drama is without a doubt the Oscars. The Oscars have a long history of cutting out worthy candidates, all the way back to the beginning.
That’s right, Greta Gerwig isn’t the first. “City Lights,” for instance, a film released back in 1931, starred a young Charlie Chaplin, an actor whom many people to this day believe deserved a Best Actor nomination.
The most recent outrage obviously being the snubbing of “Barbie,” or more specifically the snubbing of Greta Gerwig, its director, whom, many believe at least deserved at least a nomination for Best Director. She did, however, earn a nomination for her screenplay.
She was far from the only one. Several others, such as Leonardo DiCaprio, were cut out of the Best Actor category. Bradley Cooper’s film “Maestro,” which he wrote, directed, and starred in was greatly snubbed, earning nominations in nearly every single category — yet walking away with nothing.
Back in 2009, prompted by the outrage over the fact that Chris Nolan’s “The Dark Knight” didn’t make the list of Best Picture nominees, the list was lengthened from just five to 10. One of their only efforts to be more inclusive and make room for more fantastical movies in the running, “Black Panther” made history in 2018 by being the first comic book film to be nominated for Best Picture since 1931; since then, the only other has been 2019’s “Joker.”
Many of the more fantastical movies are looked down upon by many people in the industry itself; Martin Scorsese for example, who famously said in a 2019 interview that Marvel wasn’t cinema, and that they remind of theme parks, which sparked great discussion among movie-goers. What he meant by this is that when people go to see a Marvel film, or any of the action/comedy genre, they are going for some rush of adrenaline; the grandiose fights and action sequences, the capes and the lasers. While, to some extent he’s right, I think audiences go for the excitement but stay for the story.
I think the age of comic book movies being snubbed is coming to close, as they get more frequent and accepted over time. It probably won’t be long until some new innovation of film upsets things and then the whole thing starts over again.
