“Stand up.
You are a king."
Black Panther has smashed box-office records,
wowed critics,
and meant a lot to many people on a personal level.
"Wakanda Forever!"
Still, there are some who’ve felt that its critical acclaim was overblown
or even said the film doesn’t deserve its Best Picture Oscar nomination.
So, let’s step back for a minute and think about how Black Panther
compares to your typical Oscar nominee.
In fact, many of this film’s attributes seem like perfect Oscar bait.
We’ve got royal families figuring out how to lead;
themes like the ramifications of colonialism
and the struggles of black identity;
"Just burry me in the ocean,
with my ancestors that jumped from the ships."
Black Panther wraps these
intellectual pursuits up in a fun, action-packed superhero package,
and it’s made over 1.3 billion dollars at the box office.
So, some take it less seriously as an awards contender
precisely because of this popularity.
If we look back at Oscar history, this bias against the popular film
is actually very recent.
So let’s look at what it means to be a popular, award-worthy film today
and why Black Panther’s seven Oscar nominations are truly historic.
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When the Academy tried to introduce a new category
for "Best Popular Film" in August 2018,
audiences protested that this sends the message that a film
can’t be both “popular” and “great.”
But there was a time, not really that long ago,
when the Best Pictures winners were the popular movies.
Think Forrest Gump, Gladiator, or Titanic.
1966 Best Picture winner The Sound of Music
earned the equivalent of $2.37 billion worldwide,
which sounds crazy today, given the kind of movie this is.
“That will bring us back to doe, a deer, a female deer.”
But the last very popular film to win Best Picture was
Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King in 2004.
According to Quartz, nearly 75% of Best Picture winners between 1957 and 2004
earned over $200 million domestically adjusted for inflation,
but since 2004 none have.
Not one Best Picture winner in the last decade has been a top 10 grosser.
So what changed?
Did blockbusters get worse, or did the awards get snobbier?
First, there’s an economic explanation.
In the 2000s studios began
to shift away from mid-budget movies.
As Tom Shone wrote for the Guardian, "Hollywood no longer makes
the kind of movies that used to win Academy Awards,
which is to say, mid-range, mid-budget humanitarian epics
like Dances With Wolves, Gandhi, and Driving Miss Daisy.”
Studios decided that the modest returns of medium-budget pictures
weren’t worth the gamble, especially when you factor in
the high marketing budgets that most films need.
In a big studios’ eyes, even the return of a successful awards darling
like Phantom Thread,
which made almost $48 million worldwide, sounds like a rounding error compared
to the profits of another film from that year,
Star Wars: The Last Jedi, which raked in more than 1.3 billion dollars.
In this system where studios are investing so much money in fewer properties,
they’re looking for safe, guaranteed financial investments,
so they turn to sequels and franchises.
And this has worked from a profit perspective.
But it naturally entails less originality in storytelling
and leads to a decline in the average quality of big-budget movies.
In the 80s, as studios discovered the power of franchises
the percentage of Best Picture winners that were also top 10 grossers
suddenly dropped from 100% to 60%, and that doesn’t feel like a coincidence.
In the meantime, cinema’s loss has been TV’s gain.
A lot of the high-quality mid-level budget content
that might have been both Oscar-winning and popular in the past
is now reaching audiences through TV and streaming platforms.
So it’s valid to say that today’s super-high-budget,
very popular movies aren’t on average going
to be as good as a lot of the popular movies
that used to win Oscars.
"Don't ask me about my business, Kate."
"IS IT TRUE?"
"DON'T ask me about my business."
"NO!"
"Enough!"
"I don't love you anymore."
"I'll never be hungry again."
"It's squirts the fuel in so you can go faster."
"Oh...
I like to go faster."
At the same time, the criticism
that the Oscars are out-of-touch is also true.
As the Oscars have turned their back on popular movies in the last 15 years,
the ceremony has suffered.
The 2018 Oscars had the lowest viewership ever.
The Oscars attempts to fix their viewership problems
by announcing pointless tweaks - only alienate their base.
Shaving 10 minutes off the broadcast won’t get new viewers.
"And sir, you're doing a great job, but you're so quick with that stick,
so why don't you sit, because I may never be here again."
But, as history has proved, what could attract viewers
is recognizing films that people have actually seen.
The most viewed Oscar ceremony ever?
That was 20 years ago, when over 55 million people
watched box-office titan Titanic carry the night in 1998.
"I'm the king of the world!"
Black Panther is a landmark movie in another way.
It’s the first superhero movie ever nominated for the top prize.
There’s a long-standing bias against genre movies at the Oscars-
only one horror movie has won Best Picture;
and the same goes for fantasy;
and no science fiction movie has ever won Best Picture.
Some speculate that the Academy expanded the Best Picture category
to allow up to 10 nominees starting in 2010
largely because a very good and very popular superhero movie
had been excluded the previous year-
Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight.
The superhero film is an incredibly relevant --
if not the most relevant -- movie form of our times.
“Nakia thinks we should be doing more foreign aid, refugee programs.”
“You let the refugees in, they bring their problems with them.”
Superhero movies grapple with current issues like arms dealing,
corruption, and government regulation.
They’re also the epics of our modern age and historically, the Oscars love epics.
"But they'll never take OUR FREEDOM!"
Yet so far, the Avengers movies fail to get the respect
that a Lawrence of Arabia once did.
“Every superhero movie is the same thing.
A person who doesn’t have powers gets them,
has to figure out how they work, and then has to find a glowy thing.”
That’s starting to change- over the last decade,
Marvel has revolutionized the form by creating an entire cinematic universe,
letting us see character development play out over multiple movies,
incorporating complicated and thought-provoking themes,
and bringing in acclaimed actors.
While the phrase “Best Picture” implies a degree of objectivity,
in reality it’s incredibly subjective and there’s not a very clear criteria
for what makes a movie Oscar-worthy.
If you believe the Best Picture winner should be the movie with
the most cultural significance for the moment,
then you might say Get Out should have won last year
and Black Panther should win this year.
If it’s the film with the strongest emotional impact,
maybe you’d pick Call Me By Your Name last year
and A Star is Born this year.
If you believe that craftsmanship and mastery of the medium
should be the deciders,
then you’d likely choose The Shape of Water
or Phantom Thread last year,
and Roma or The Favourite this year.
Black Panther fits pretty much all the criteria
you could think of for an award-worthy film.
It showcases the skills of a director, cinematographer, and actors
who have all been previously nominated for major awards.
It poses big moral questions.
“He is a monster of our own making.”
It calls on classic, timeless tropes.
“An enemy sits on the throne.”
It represents our current cultural moment.
“Now, more than ever, the illusions of division
threaten our very existence."
In a nutshell, it’s a serious movie,
"Communities flooded with drugs and weapons,
they are overly policed and incarcerated-
all over the planet our people suffer,
because they don't have the tools to fight back."
Which, you might say, is basically the only hard requriement
for a best picture winner.
And in addition to all that, Black Panther boasts the extra ingredient
that so few Best Picture nominees have anymore- popularity.
The obvious value of a film that is both popular and good
is that it can reach a lot more people.
If it poses deep, sophisticated questions
about our society, a lot more members of that society hear those questions.
“It's about two billion people all over the world that looks like us.
But their lives are a lot harder.
Wakanda has the tools to liberate 'em all.”
So, while Black Panther’s Best Picture nomination
may indicate a shift back towards good popular movies
getting critical praise,
more importantly, we hope it will inspire more popular movies
to go for that Oscar.
Black Panther challenges other big-budget movies to be smarter.
And if the Oscars want to continue to have mainstream cultural relevance,
they need more quality, popular movies like Black Panther
to grace our cinema screens in the future.
“More connects us than separates us.”
This is Elaine McMillion Sheldon.
Elaine is an Oscar nominated filmmaker
who has directed two Netflix original documentaries.
And, Elaine teaches a class on creating short documentary films
on Skillshare.
"When a lot of people think about filmmaking,
they think about the actual act of filming,
but about 80% of the job is doing work before and after.
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