There's a question ping-ponging around the movie world as to whether or not "Spider-Man: No Way Home" should be nominated for Best Picture at the upcoming Academy Awards.
The answer: Sure, why not. And they might as well go ahead and nominate Andrew Garfield for Best Supporting Actor while they're at it.
Maybe the fact that Garfield is even in the movie is a spoiler, but it's already earned more than $ billion worldwide. (Once a movie earns its first $1 billion, you can consider the spoilers spoiled.)
That's a heck of a lot of people by any measure — it's already eighth on the list of all-time domestic moneymakers, and will likely soon climb into the top five — but especially at a time when any movie not starring multiple webslingers is playing to theaters with tumbleweeds rolling down the aisles.
Spidey is a huge hit with audiences and critics alike — on Rotten Tomatoes, it's sitting pretty with a 95% audience score and a 90% critics score — but it wasn't really in the Best Picture conversation until star Tom Holland and the film's producers dropped it in it as part of an interview with the Hollywood Reporter that ran on Christmas Eve. The long and short of it: they all really think "Spider-Man: No Way Home" should be nominated for Best Picture, and at this point, it's hard to disagree with them.
Their argument is being mounted at a time when the movies, and the Oscars in particular, are at a crossroads. Ratings for the annual telecast have fallen off a cliff — last year drew just 9.23 million viewers, less than the recent "Yellowstone" season finale — as the types of films that the Academy honors have skewed further and further away from popular tastes. Of the last 10 Best Picture winners, only one, "Argo," has crossed the $100 million mark at the domestic box office, and several ("Moonlight," "Birdman," "Spotlight" and "The Artist") failed to hit the $50 million marker. (Last year's winner, "Nomadland," grossed just $3.7 million at the domestic box office, but that gets an asterisk, along with everything else from 2020.)
Meanwhile, serious movies for adults — read: non-superhero films, the types of films that traditionally fill the Best Picture slots — have been nonstarters at the box office of late, with titles like "The Last Duel," "King Richard" and "West Side Story" severely underperforming during their theatrical runs. Yes, their tallies were affected by the fact that we're very much still in the throes of a pandemic, but it speaks to a larger growing trend at the movies, where theaters have become playgrounds for only the blockbusteriest of blockbusters — i.e. "Spider-Man" and the rest of his Marvel pals — and everything else is seen as, "eh, I can stream that one at home."
(The issues also point to our reliance on old world models — namely TV ratings and box office figures — as means for measuring impact and reach and how we may need to find new metrics to gauge those things by, but that's a topic for another column.)
So the Academy Awards are left with an existential question: continue to appeal to a dwindling audience, or change to reflect broader, more mainstream tastes in moviegoing. A "Spider-Man" nomination would be a step toward achieving the latter.
Not that it would be a permanent fix on a mounting problem. But it would be an acknowledgment that yes, the system needs refining, and yes, the Academy cares about both the audience and the movie business at large. It's superheroes, after all, who are doing the business part of the movie business equation, a fact from which the Academy often shies away.
Often, but not always. "Black Panther" received a Best Picture nomination in 2019, and in the last decade and some change both Heath Ledger and Joaquin Phoenix have won Oscars for playing Batman villain the Joker. But those instances are seen as having a prestige factor that the current "Spider-Man" does not. "No Way Home" is just a down-the-middle crowd-pleasing superhero movie, which is living up to its billing and actually pleasing crowds.
So yeah, honor it with a nomination, it deserves it. It won't win Best Picture — at this point it's looking like that distinction will go to "The Power of the Dog" or "Belfast," films with the combined viewership that Spidey manages in an afternoon — but it will acknowledge its achievement from artistic, technical and financial standpoints. And it will give average moviegoers a rooting interest in the show, something the Academy Awards at this point desperately needs. Is that really so bad?
As for Andrew Garfield, he's simply delightful in the movie in his return as Peter Parker, and he successfully closes the loop on a role that never really suited him in a fun, self-effacing performance that made fans think differently about his tenure as Spidey and showed his levity as an actor. That's not an easy thing to do in the middle of a special effects bonanza, but he pulled it off with flair, and he emerged from the film its big winner.
Of course Garfield's not really even in the Best Supporting Actor conversation, which again speaks to the fact that when it comes to the Oscars, change is needed. It may be the job of a superhero to do it.
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