Number of Nominations: 1 – Visual Effects (Richard Stammers,
Lou Pecora, Tim Crosbie and Cameron Waldbauer)
Number of Wins: Zero
By now, it’s widely accepted that the Academy of Motion Picture
Arts
Granted, there hasn’t been an overabundance of superhero
movies recently that have really deserved a Best Picture nod. Deadpool’s surprise nomination for a PGA
Award only raised its Oscar chances from impossible to unlikely. But what is
perhaps more surprising is how poorly superheroes have done across the board,
even in categories they might be expected to dominate. It barely requires two
hands to count the number of superhero movies that have won any kind of Academy
Award: Tim Burton’s Batman, Spider-Man 2, The Incredibles (which wasn’t based on a comic book but I’ll allow
it), The Dark Knight, Big Hero 6, and now (sigh) Suicide Squad. If you want to stretch it,
we could include Warren Beatty’s Dick
Tracy, which received a comparatively warm reception from the Academy, and Men In Black, a movie most people either
don’t realize or don’t remember was based on a comic book. That’s almost as bad
a showing as movies based on toys, games and theme park attractions.
Today, superheroes are an inescapable part of the pop
culture landscape, generating billions of dollars and dominating both movie
theatres and television. But when 20th Century Fox gambled on X-Men back in 2000, superhero movies
were still risky. These days, we seem to get a new superhero movie every few
weeks. But that first X-Men movie was
the only one of its kind that year and the first real superhero movie we’d seen
since Spawn and Batman & Robin fizzled out back in ’97.
(Note: Marvel did have its first taste of success with Blade in 1998 but the marketing downplayed
its comic book DNA to focus more on bad-ass vampire action. And yeah, M. Night
Shyamalan’s deconstructionist take on superheroes Unbreakable also came out in 2000 but I think we can agree that it’s
a different type of beast than the movies we’re discussing here.)
Perhaps because it was a little early to the party, the X-Men franchise has never quite received
the respect some of its contemporaries have enjoyed. At first, it lived in the
shadow of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man
movies. The fact that Bryan Singer’s X2
outperformed the original both with critics and at the box office was soon
overshadowed by how much Raimi’s Spider-Man
2 improved on its predecessor’s reputation. Both franchises were damaged by
their third installments. But while Raimi decided to cut and run and Sony chose
to start over after Spider-Man 3, Fox
kept on truckin’ after Brett Ratner’s X-Men:
The Last Stand stumbled with critics. After all, the money coming in was
still good.
Shortly after the Marvel Cinematic Universe launched with Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk in 2008, the X-Movies entered the
spinoff/prequel stage with the misbegotten X-Men
Origins: Wolverine. While Marvel was being lauded for their ambition and
scope, Fox was beginning to look like they didn’t know what they were doing
with the X-Men. At this point, it
would have been easy for Fox to follow in Sony’s footsteps and do a hard reset
on the franchise. Instead, they doubled down on their previous work with X-Men: First Class and X-Men: Days Of Future Past, two movies
that allowed them to keep all of the elements that were working and get rid of
those that didn’t.
The culmination of all these years’ worth of world-building,
Days Of Future Past is, if anything,
a little too ambitious for its own good. By its very nature, it was always
going to be a little complicated in its attempt to reconcile multiple
timelines. But while the X-Men movies
have always featured sprawling ensemble casts, DOFP seems to go out of its way to introduce even more characters,
some of whom are barely given more than a minute or two to establish
themselves. At times, it feels like the movie should come with a cheat sheet
just so you can keep track of who’s who.
 |
| Not Pictured: About a dozen other guys. |
Still, whenever a franchise can still surprise and impress
audiences and critics with its seventh installment after over a decade, it must
be doing something right. After Marvel and Sony worked out an arrangement to
incorporate Spider-Man into the MCU, fans began to hope Marvel might work out a
similar deal with Fox. Besides the X-Men, of course, the studio also has the
rights to the Fantastic Four. Since that property has been thoroughly botched,
fans would love Marvel to just take control of the FF lock, stock and barrel.
But even fans who want the X-Men to fight alongside the Avengers don’t want to
see these movies wiped clean. Ideally, they’d like the timelines to somehow
merge or blend together so that they can be incorporated into the MCU. It isn’t
likely to happen but it does prove that Fox has made more right decisions than
wrong ones when it comes to the X-Men.
Despite fan loyalty, critical acclaim (most of the time) and
box office grosses of over 4 billion dollars, no X-Men movie received a single Oscar nomination until Days Of Future Past was recognized for
Visual Effects. Why this one? Not that the effects work isn’t impressive but is
it truly that much better than what had come before?
Well, it is and it isn’t, which is probably a big reason why
it didn’t win (it lost to Interstellar).
Visual Effects is actually a tough, somewhat strange category. It’s one of
those categories where, if the voters aren’t all that impressed by the year’s
eligible films, there can be only three or two nominees or they’ll just give it
to somebody outright. Some years, it’s not unheard of for the Academy to turn
this car around and nobody gets an award. Lately there’s been no shortage of
effects-heavy movies for their consideration but if you want a shot at this
prize, be prepared to show audiences at least one thing that is impossible.
The effects in the X-Men
movies have always been a bit workmanlike. They’re fine. There’s nothing really
wrong with them, for the most part. But there also isn’t anything like the
opening sequence in Gravity or that
tidal wave in Interstellar that
lingers in your memory and has audiences asking how they did that. Claws coming
out of hands, girls walking through walls and folks massaging their temples or
waving their hands in the air while they manipulate ice or fire or whatever?
That’s all very nice but we’ve seen it plenty of times before.
The post-apocalyptic hellscape of DOFP’s future scenes and the shape-shifting Sentinels certainly
didn’t hurt the movie’s chances at a nomination. But if one thing put the movie
over the top, it was the “Time In A Bottle” sequence featuring Evan Peters’
Quicksilver making short work of an attack in a cramped, sprinkler-soaked
kitchen. As entertaining as previous entries had been, none of them really had
this kind of conversation starter setpiece before. Nightcrawler’s infiltration
of the White House in X2 came close
but it wasn’t scored to a Jim Croce tune. Never underestimate the power of a
pop song to help land a scene in the film history books.
Even though the X-Men’s first time at bat didn’t bring home
a trophy, there’s no reason to suspect Days
Of Future Past will be the franchise’s last nomination. Even though Hugh
Jackman (and apparently Patrick Stewart) are saying goodbye to the series with Logan Logan
The X-Men movies
have been taken for granted for too long. They’ve been doing this longer and
more successfully than most of their contemporaries. And they haven’t been
content to simply rehash the same formula over and over again. Movies like Deadpool and Logan (not to mention TV shows like Legion) show a willingness to innovate and expand the genre’s
parameters. After all these years, you’d think they’d have more than a single
Oscar nomination to show for it.
X-Men: Days Of Future
Past is available on Blu-ray, DVD and 4K Ultra HD from 20th Century
Fox Home Entertainment.
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