Count Jimmy Kimmel among the movie fans who were apoplectic about “Spider-Man: No Way Home” failing to crack the list of Best Picture nominees at the 2022 Oscars. On his eponymous late-night show, the former Oscars host slammed the academy’s “unforgivable omission” of the box office juggernaut and questioned why “Don’t Look Up” was nominated instead.
“How did that not get one of the 10 nominations for Best Picture? There are only eleven movies made this year,” Kimmel joked on Tuesday’s episode of “Jimmy Kimmel Live.” “Forget the fact that the movie made $750 million and is still going, this was a great movie. It wasn’t in the top-10 best movies of the year? There were three Spider-Men in it!”
After pointing out that “Spider-Man: No Way Home” starred two of the year’s Best Actor nominees in Andrew Garfield (for “tick, tick… boom!”) and Benedict Cumberbatch (for “The Power of the Dog”), Kimmel took aim at “Don’t Look Up” and its polarizing reviews a point of comparison to the Marvel hit.
“You’re telling me ‘Don’t Look Up’ was better than ‘Spider-Man’? It most certainly was not,” Kimmel said. “Even if you go by the critics’ reviews – on Rotten Tomatoes, ‘Don’t Look Up’ – among top critics – got a 46. Spider-Man has a 90!”
Kimmel also wondered why awards movies had to be, in his words, thought of as “serious” to merit Oscar consideration. “As far as I know, this was not the point of feature film when they started making them,” he said, citing “Ben-Hur” and “The Wizard of Oz” as movies with fantastical elements and broad setpieces. “There’s nothing wrong with a serious movie. A lot of them are fantastic and worthy of Oscars. But why do they have to be serious is what I’m saying? When did that become a prerequisite to getting nominated for an Academy Award?”
Kimmel’s comments echo remarks Marvel boss Kevin Feige and Sony leader Tom Rothman said last year in a piece published by The Hollywood Reporter that heralded Sony’s plans to push “Spider-Man: No Way Home” as a legitimate Best Picture contender.
“Quality commerciality is really hard to do. ‘No Way Home’ is superb filmmaking. And this is what the academy needs to stay connected to,” Rothman said.
“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,” Feige added. “That, to me, is a very good thing — the sort of thing the academy was founded, back in the day, to recognize.”
While neither Rothman nor Feige commented on the “No Way Home” Best Picture snub, Kimmel did have one theory for why it missed a nomination.
“You want to know what happened? The academy voters, they looked at the list and they saw the names Leo DiCaprio and Meryl Streep, and they checked that box and then they put their kids in the car and they went to the movie ‘Spider-Man.’ And they loved it. But they didn’t vote for it,” he said, again drawing a comparison between “No Way Home” and “Don’t Look Up.”
“We may need to get Dr. Strange to go back in time to fix this,” he joked.
Despite its Best Picture snub, “Spider-Man: No Way Home” was nominated for Best Visual Effects, where it could become the first superhero movie since “Spider-Man 2” to take home an Oscar in that category. “Don’t Look Up” received four nominations: Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay for Adam McKay, Best Score, and Best Editing.
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