An Inconvenient Truth - The Dark Knight Didn’t Deserve The Nomination

The fallout has been swift and decisive. No more than 10 minutes had past from when the official 2009 Oscar Nominations where announced to when the backlash began. 90% of the backlash was over one category. The Dark Knight failed to garner one of the five coveted spots for a Best Picture nomination.

Anger hath swept the interweb all day. A lot of people are labeling the Oscars a “sham” and a “joke” for it’s failure to give the Christopher Nolan film it’s proper, in their eyes, props… and if I had a nickel for every use of the work “snub” I’ve read or heard today I’d be a rich rich rich man my friends.

BUt just as Al Gore had to lay an inconvenient truth on us about the state of the climate… so to must someone come out and do a very unpopular thing. There is another inconvenient truth that must be spoken. And that inconvenient truth is that The Dark Knight didn’t deserve to be nominated for best picture this year.

It’s a great film. I personally had it at #8 on my best films of the year list. Perhaps in another year with slightly weaker competition it would have been nominated. There is certainly a case for arguing The Dark Knight’s merits for deserving one. But when all is said and done, as good as The Dark Knight is (I personally like it more and more each time I see it), the fact of the matter is, in my opinion anyway, it didn’t deserve to given one of the top 5 spots, and it’s absence from the Nominee List is not only acceptable, but proper.

Now don’t get me wrong… I certainly wouldn’t have complained if it had indeed been given a nomination. As a matter of fact I half expected it to get nominated.

THE MOST OVERRATED MOVIE OF THE YEAR

Let’s get this straight first. Just because something is overrated does NOT mean it’s not good or quality. It just means that it gets more praise than it deserves… regardless of how good it is. The Dark Knight is a great movie… but right from the first weekend the hyperbole pouring out about HOW great it is was nauseating. It got so bad some people were calling it the greatest film of all time, or the greatest crime drama of all time and other various nonsense like that.

Right from the beginning it felt like us fan boys had been so desperate for so long to have one of OUR films (a genre film… a comic book film) be this good, that the moment such a film appeared we wanted to crown it Caesar and heap as many accolades on it as possible. The hype for the film took on a life of it’s own and grew bigger than the movie itself. So while The Dark Knight is great, it was nonetheless tragically overrated.

TANGIBLE WEAKNESSES

With the massive euphoria surrounding the film, people on a mass scale seemed to willfully blind themselves to the obvious weaknesses of the movie (yes, even the best movies have weaknesses). It seemed like no one would acknowledge some of the more blatant mistakes of the film. Thankfully, as with most movies, I’m finding that as more time passes, people are willing to own up to some of these weaknesses. But we’re still not there yet.

It’s almost as if people fear that if you admit or acknowledge one of your favorite movies has flaws… it somehow invalidates your love for that movie. I think that’s nonsense. I wrote the following back in July to illustrate this:

“Regular Movie Blog readers know how much I loved Transformers. I bloody flipped my lid for that movie beyond all reasonable limits. I said it was the most fun summer flick I’d ever seen and I said it was the best visual effects I’d ever seen. However, if you read my stuff, or if you listened to the Transformers DVD commentary that we did, you’ll know that I openly talk about the many weaknesses of the movie. The painful dialog in places, the poor choice in certain characters they used, the horrible lack of dialog between the decepticons (how can you have a transformers movie and only have 1 single line between Megatron and Starscream?!?!) Just because I acknowledges the film had a lot of flaws didn’t mean I couldn’t still love it”

The film was too long. All the mobsters besides the Joker himself were dreadful, the boat scene was so terrible it risked ruining the grittiness of the film, the way they wasted Two-Face (not Harvey) was a joke and Bale’s Batman voice got worse than it was in the first one. These are real issues that very few seem willing to acknowledge. Just a few too many things (again, in my opinion) to make it a “lock” for an Oscar Nomination.

WAS THE DARK KNIGHT PURPOSEFULLY SNUBBED BECAUSE IT’S A GENRE FILM?

Some people, including a bunch I really respect, are suggesting that The Dark Knight was purposefully snubbed by the Academy because it’s a “genre” film. The suggestion is that the 6000 voting members all somehow collectively decided they hate genre films and would not allow a genre film to get an Oscar nomination on their watch.

The problem with that logic is summed up in 5 simple words: THE LORD OF THE RINGS. The Lord of the Rings trillogy by any definition are a set of genre flims. The ultimate geek movies really. Wizards and trolls, swords and monsters, elves in woodland kingdoms with magic rings and potions. The Lord of the Rings films are geek genre films… and yet all 3 of them got nominated for best picture and The Return of the King tied the record for most Oscar wins by taking home 11 awards (winning in ever single category it was nominated for). So please don’t try to suggest the Academy is just out to snub genre films… because that’s just silly.

ONLY 5 CAN BE CHOSEN

The Oscar is a tough award to win. Over 4000 full feature length films were produced in the US last year… and of those 4000+ movies only 5 can be nominated. Add on top of that the fact that film is subjective and each member of the Academy will have a slightly different view than the next. There can be only 5… and The Dark Knight wasn’t one of them. All things considered, I don’t think it’s all that surprising, all that unjust and realistically not a “snub” in the least.

Just my two cents on the issue. What do you think?