You’re all entitled to your opinion. But this one, in particular, is wrong.
The nominations for the 2020 Academy Awards have been announced and Joker has come out on top with no less than 11 nods.
That puts it on par with classics like The Godfather, Chinatown, Amadeus, Saving Private Ryan and The Lord Of The Rings: Return Of The King.
If you’re thinking that it doesn’t deserve to be among such high-profile company, then here are some other movies that were also nominated for 11 Oscars: Hugo, The Aviator, Out Of Africa, The Turning Point, Julia, Oliver! and Judgment At Nuremberg.
None of them could be considered classics and while we’re at it, here are some movies that actually went on to WIN some Oscars: Pearl Harbour, The Blind Side, The Wolfman, Norbit, Suicide Squad, and in case you’ve forgotten, Crash (which beat Brokeback Mountain to Best Picture that year).
While Twitter was immediately flooded with hot takes about how Joker did not deserve the number of nominations it received, here is a little recap on its awards circuit to date:
Four Golden Globes nominations (including two wins), 11 BAFTA nominations, two Screen Actors Guild Awards, and winner of the AFI Movie of the Year. Oh, and it won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival, which is pretty much a precursor to Oscar success.
That is before mentioning that the $55 million production has currently made $1.063 billion at the box office. So the movie is a huge commercial and critical success and even though many critics (and viewers in general) tend not to see the Oscars as anything more than a popularity contest, all the toys go out of the pram when Joker gets so many nominations?
Okay, fine, then let us go through those nominations, see if any don’t make any sense.
Best Actor – Very few people have had as much acclaim for their performance this year as Phoenix has, so even if you disagree with every other nomination, there is very little sense in arguing with this one.
Best Cinematography – Lawrence Sher did an incredible job of visually popping us inside Fleck’s mind for his fantasy sequences and then making it feel all too real when we were back in the “real world” of 1980s Gotham.
Best Score – The creeping, industrial work by Hildur Guðnadóttir is without a doubt one of the best of the year.
Best Make-Up & Hairstyling – While pretty much all of this is tied to how they made Fleck look throughout the movie, his take on Joker is now as memorable and scorched into the public mind as Nicholson’s, or Ledger’s, or Hamill’s.
Best Costume Design – Ditto.
Best Film Editing / Best Sound Mixing / Best Sound Editing – We’re lumping these three in together, as they represent a more technical aspect of the production. If anything, Joker is far more deserving of Best Editing than The Irishman, which went on for over three and a half hours and was in need of a more ruthless editor. Joker kept it to a tight two hours. Admittedly, the sound mixing/editing categories are usually reserved for the more technically minded productions (this year includes 1917, Ad Astra, Ford V Ferrari and The Rise Of Skywalker). But Once Upon A Time In… Hollywood is also nominated in both categories, so whatever that and Joker were putting down, the Academy were clearly picking up.
Best Adapted Screenplay – After decades and decades of stories about Joker and Batman, Phillips and his co-writer Scott Silver have taken one of the most iconic characters in the history of fiction and given him an incredibly detailed fail from grace. You just have to look at Suicide Squad to see how badly this character can be handled. And instead, we got a movie that some folks were genuinely concerned might incite rioting and violent reactions in the audience.
Best Directing – Again, taking the Joker and turning him a product of society instead of just a blank canvas for chaos, while somehow still tying it into the mythos of Bruce Wayne… that isn’t something that happens by accident. And, somehow, this is from the director of The Hangover and Old School.
Best Picture – If, by now, after the listing of the awards, the nominations, the money, the public reaction, the critical reaction and the work that went into this movie, you still don’t understand why the Oscars nominated this movie for Best Picture, then the joke is on you.
LISTEN: You Must Be Jokin’ with Aideen McQueen – Faith healers, Coolock craic and Gigging as Gaeilge
