Spider-Man has lost so much in his many lives, and the chance for Spider-Man: No Way Home to win the 2022 Oscar for Best Picture just got added to that list. Yes, while many won't be surprised by the news — super hero movies don't get the big Oscars (with the exception of Heath Ledger's posthumous win for playing The Joker in The Dark Knight) — we're guessing Sony Pictures is.
This morning, as the 2022 Oscar nominations were revealed, it became clear that Sony's work to campaign for its box office record-breaking Spider-Man movie to get the most important awards was going to result in a failure.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences only gave Spider-Man: No Way Home a single nomination, for Best Visual Effects. Long held as one of the few places comic book movies show up for the Oscars, it sits alongside another MCU movie in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, the final Daniel Craig Bond movie No Time to Die, the video game movie Free Guy and Dune (which led the field for nominations).
Well, Sony and Marvel are in fact going for it. (C/O @Calunga_Mr) pic.twitter.com/ETdA73vrDxJanuary 3, 2022
But, as you can see above, that didn't stop Sony from pushing out "For Your Conisderation" ads that suggested No Way Home was Oscar-worthy.
Analysis: Why Spider-Man: No Way Home struck out on big Oscar nods
No matter how highly any of us my rank No Way Home in our list of the best Spider-Man movies, best MCU movies or even best movies of 2021, it always had a mostly-impossible hill to climb. Comic book movies, with the aforementioned example of Ledger in The Dark Knight, are often not taken seriously by the MPAA.
At the same time, though, this year did show that the Academy is open for other often-snubbed genres. Dune, an adaptation of a classic sci-fi novel based around families at war for the "spice" drug on the planet Arrakis, pulled in 10 Oscar nominations — including Best Picture (with zero acting nominations). While that could be attributed to them taking the film more seriously because of its prestigious director Denis Villeneuve (he was nominated for Arrival in 2017), Villeneuve himself did not get a Best Director nomination.
So, in the end, while Spider-Man: No Way Home did get some praise (and some jeers) from critics, its most resounding win so far was at the box office. And since this is the Oscars, and not the People's Choice Awards, those millions of tickets don't have much power to sway the voters.
In a related story, we've got bad news (for most people) about Spider-Man: No Way Home's first streaming service — because it isn't Disney Plus (and it's going to take a while to get there.
