Spider-Man: No Way Home star Tom Holland, as well as the heads at Marvel Studios and Sony Entertainment, are pushing for the latest Spider-Man film to receive a Best Picture nod at the upcoming Academy Awards.
"This is a big picture on the big screen at a moment when the big screen experience is fighting for its life. This is a chance for the Academy to strike a blow for the big screen," said Tom Rothman, the current chairman of Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group, in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. Rothman also drew comparisons to the way The Return of the King, the third installment of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy, swept the Oscars in 2004. "This is why they expanded the best picture category to 10 films, for exactly this circumstance," he said.
This comes after an announcement that Spider-Man: No Way Home was shortlisted for the 94th Academy Awards in the Sound and Effects categories. Three other MCU films joined the Effects shortlist as well, including, Black Widow, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings and Eternals.
"You can ask [Martin] Scorsese 'Would you want to make a Marvel movie?' But he doesn't know what it's like because he's never made one," said Holland, addressing the difference, or lack thereof, between the making of films that are deemed "Oscar-worthy" and Marvel movies. "I've made Marvel movies and I've also made movies that have been in the conversation in the world of the Oscars, and the only difference, really, is one is much more expensive than the other. But the way I break down the character, the way the director etches out the arc of the story and characters -- it's all the same, just done on a different scale. So I do think they're real art."
It's not as if superhero films have never received Oscar nods in the past. In 2019, Black Panther won three Academy Awards for Production Design, Original Score and Costume Design. It was the first MCU film to win an Academy Award and the first superhero film to be nominated for Best Picture.
"Just because they're a certain kind of genre doesn't mean they're not quality movies," No Way Home producer Amy Pascal told THR. "We all got in this business to make movies that people want to see, that make people feel things, and I think this movie legitimately does that."
Following its official release in theaters, the long-awaited Spider-Man threequel broke box-office records and is a hit with both critics and audiences alike as the second-best reviewed MCU film on Rotten Tomatoes. No Way Home currently holds a 94% score on the Tomatometer with 332 reviews at the time of writing but debuted to a perfect score overall. The critical consensus calls the film a "bigger, bolder Spider-Man sequel [that] expands the franchise's scope and stakes without losing sight of its humor and heart."
"I think both of these types of films deserve recognition," said Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige, who has discussed the genre bias towards superhero films in the past in terms of the Oscars. "It's a good thing when people are in a theater and they stand up and cheer. It's a good thing when people are wiping tears because they're thinking back on their last 20 years of moviegoing and what it has meant to them. That, to me, is a very good thing -- the sort of thing the Academy was founded, back in the day, to recognize."
Spider-Man: No Way Home is now playing in theaters.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter