Last awards season, “Black Panther” became the first comic-book movie to receive an Oscar nomination for best picture. Since then, “Avengers: Endgame” has become the highest-grossing film of all time and one of the best-reviewed movies of 2019. Todd Phillips’ recently released “Joker” won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and broke its share of box office records. Have comic-book movies finally arrived on the red carpet?
More like the rug’s being pulled from under them again. And Martin Scorsese has fibers under his fingernails.
Despite consistently sporting sterling scores on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, Marvel Cinematic Universe movies rarely appear on critics’ top 10 lists and have never received Oscar nominations for direction, acting or writing. They remain outside that golden embrace, despite the exquisitely detailed filmmaking of, say, Ryan Coogler’s “Panther” or the taut, ‘70s paranoia of “Captain America: The Winter Soldier.” Millions and millions around the world are emotionally connected to these movies, yet film titan Scorsese calls them “not cinema” — even those he hasn’t actually seen.
Is it the tights?
Scorsese, in his comments to Empire, summed up the ingrained bias when he said, “I don’t see them. I tried, you know? But that’s not cinema. … It isn’t the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.” He doubled down at a London Film Festival press conference: “It’s not cinema, it’s something else, we shouldn’t be invaded by it, so that is a big issue and we need the theater owners to step up to allow theaters to show films that are narrative films.”
Resentment at studios’ tentpole strategies, increasingly leaving adult dramas to indies and streaming services, may be in part responsible for the refusal to include massive-grossing comic-book movies in awards conversations. But “Avengers: Infinity War” didn’t prevent “The Farewell” or “Jojo Rabbit” or even Scorsese’s “The Irishman” from being made. In fact, Taika Waititi’s success with MCU entry “Thor: Ragnarok” likely enabled his Oscar-contending “Jojo” to be greenlit.
Scorsese’s ire may be due in part to major exhibitors such as AMC and Regal refusing to show his 3 1/2-hour Netflix-backed “Irishman,” but that isn’t because MCU films have elbowed it out; it’s part of the ongoing dispute between theater owners and streaming services over windows of exclusivity.
But he’s not alone in his dismissal of the genre. Contemporary Francis Ford Coppola, after receiving the Prix Lumière in Lyon, told journalists he thought Scorsese was “right because we expect to learn something from cinema, we expect to gain something, some enlightenment, some knowledge, some inspiration.”
The director of “The Godfather” and “Captain EO” added: “Martin was kind when he said it’s not cinema. He didn’t say it’s despicable, which I just say it is.”
Source: ‘Avengers’ and comic book movies are cinema. Our tears say it all – Los Angeles Times