A Dark Night for the Dark Knight
I got to work this morning to find that the Oscar nominations had been posted. Much talk has been made about how The Dark Knight would fare with the Academy. Well, the answer is not so… well.
Now I know why nobody’s smiling.
By my count, TDK nabbed eight nominations. This would sound like a fair number except that it got snubbed in almost every major category.
Best Picture? Nope. Best Director? Nope. Best Actor? Nope. Heath Ledger sneaks into the Best Supporting Actor field with the posthumous nomination. Best Original Screenplay? No again. So where are the seven other nominations?
Planted firmly in the second tier, the awards given to films deemed not quite good enough, to wit: Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography, Best Sound Mixing, Best Sound Editing, Best Film Editing, Best Makeup, and Best Visual Effects. TDK has been sent to the land of misfit films.
Examining things a bit further, let’s run down some of the films that took some of the major nominations instead of TDK. I’ll use Rotten Tomatoes “top critics” tomatometer as the basis for the comparison (higher scores are better).
- The Dark Knight: 90%
- The Reader (Best Picture, Best Director): 52%
- The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay): 77%
- Changeling (Best Director): 44%
My question here is if TDK compares so favorably to these other films in the critical measure (I’m not even looking at the popular or financial measures), on what criteria did the Academy rely to select these other films instead? It doesn’t make any sense. It’s almost as if the sheer popularity and success of the film were black marks held against it. Of course, this is insane. TDK is the exact kind of summer blockbuster everyone should want. It’s not check-your-brain-at-the-door junk. It’s smart, well-written, well-acted, and well-crafted. If those qualities are not worthy of the Academy’s highest awards, what are the awards for?
What do you think?