"No Way Home" and Oscar Dreams. Or, When advocacy goes wrong...
Friday, December 24, 2021 at 1:47PM by Nathaniel R
There are some that argue that Oscar pundits shouldn't be critics or vice versa. Prognostication and film criticism both require analytical skills but they're different jobs. The lines get murkier when it comes to advocacy. Each media outlet produces more Oscar coverage than we have ever had in the past. It's subversively hilarious that as Oscar ratings have steadily dwindled in the era of splintering audiences, discussion and analysis of the awards race is noisier and more populated each year! Yet, if the proliferation of film critics organizations has taught us anything it's that if you get enough film types in a room to talk "Best"... they will immediately, whether consciously or not, begin to equate Best with Oscars. That's how successful the Oscars have been as a name brand and institution. You can see it in the prizes given each year in the precursor awards and how eagerly space is handed over to presumed Oscar hopefuls that don't really need the boost. Even while the same journalists and outlets, who vote on the preliminary prizes, regularly bemoan that 'Oscars never get it right'. Advocacy doesn't equal prognostication but it looks too much like it at times.
Into this mess of adjacent but not always compatible agendas, comes the superhero blockbuster. In this case, Spider-Man: No Way Home which is suddenly getting the "nominate it for Best Picture!" discussion...
Action, Best Picture, Oscars (21), Punditry, Spider-Man, Tom Holland, film critics, superheroes 
