8. The Lack of Major Nominations for The Dark Knight
Everyone remembers that morning in January 2009 where we expected to see the Academy fall in line with the rest of the guilds by giving Christopher Nolan’s epic masterpiece The Dark Knight multiple nominations, including those for Best Picture and Best Director. Why would this happen? Well, the PGA, DGA, and WGA all nominated the film for its top honors, and given that those same organizations contain several Academy members as well, it just seemed natural. Plus, the film had done extremely well throughout the critics awards, receiving multiple nominations from major groups, including the BFCA, LAFCA, and the OFCS.
Back to that January morning though, the major categories are announced and the only nomination the film could squeeze out in the top categories was the one it was guaranteed to get all along: Best Supporting Actor for the late Heath Ledger. When the entire list was revealed, we saw that it had made a decent showing, earning eight nominations in total, but they were mostly for much smaller awards such as Sound Editing, Sound Mixing, and Makeup. Where were the nominations for Adapted Screenplay, Best Director and Best Picture? The film was a huge critical success, sitting at 94% (8.5/10) on Rotten Tomatoes and 82/100 on Metacritic. Something smelled very fishy here.
This was the last year that we had five nominees for Best Picture, so it didn’t take long to discover which was the sore thumb sticking out for the world to see. We had Slumdog Millionaire, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon, Milk, and…. The Reader?!? A film that had not been nominated by the PGA, DGA, WGA, or for the SAG Ensemble, a film that currently sits at 61% (6.4/10) on Rotten Tomatoes and 58/100 on Metacritic, had somehow found itself with Oscar nominations for Picture, Director, and Adapted Screenplay, among others. Interesting, no?
So how did things get so screwy? Bribery on the part of the Weinsteins is highly suspected. Of course, it’s just speculation, but how else do you explain such a crazy flip-flop? We all know what happened next. Due to the Academy’s terrible failure, they revised the Best Picture rules, giving us ten nominees in the top category (a change referred to by many as “The Dark Knight Rule”). Two years later, they revised their rules again, allowing for a maximum of ten based on the number of first place votes each film receives. Would we have such an over-abundance of Best Picture nominees if they had just done what they should have done back in 2009 by giving The Dark Knight the nominations it should have received? Who knows. Either way, even the Academy seems to acknowledge that this was a pretty big error on their part, though their tinkering doesn’t really help the fact that such a great and unforgettable film got snubbed for almost all of the major categories.
Right now many of you are probably thinking, “But The Dark Knight wouldn’t have won any of the major awards anyway.” Well, you’re right. Best Picture was all sealed up for Slumdog Millionaire with its wins from the PGA, DGA (pretty much guaranteeing it the Best Director Oscar), and SAG, and with its WGA win, Adapted Screenplay was going to follow. However, that’s beside the point. Them granting the nominations would show that they’re much more in tune with what were the best films of the year, regardless of whether it’s a “comic book movie” or their usual slate of dramas. By shoving it aside, they showed that they were still too rigid at the time to nominate something outside of their comfort zone, which is odd given that almost all of the major guilds had no problem doing so.
In an attempt to compensate, they’ve lazily expanded the category, which has allowed all kinds of weird choices to get in (District 9, Winter’s Bone, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, just to name a few). Hopefully one of these days we’ll get back down to just a few nominees. The expansion has somewhat cheapened the category, plus, you can usually tell which nominees are the top five anyway, so what’s the point? In their attempt to fix things, the Academy seems to have only screwed them up more. At the very least, they seem to have learned their lesson from this incident.