Kevin Smith Addresses Backlash Over Suggesting Spider-Man: No Way Home Should Have Gotten Best Picture Oscar Nomination
After Kevin Smith expressed surprise that Spider-Man: No Way Home did not receive one of the ten possible nominations for Best Picture at the Academy Awards, "Film Twitter" came for him. In the latest episode of Fatman Beyond, Smith's weekly podcast with Marc Bernardin, Smith told his audience that he was going to try to keep quiet, since he spent days fielding vicious online trolls after the previous episode dropped. That isn't particularly surprising: if you engaged with the whole "Spider-Man deserves a nomination" discourse on Twitter, you likely saw how inexplicably vicious it got very quickly.
Smith noted that he didn't think the observation would be especially controversial, given that the expansion of the Oscars' Best Picture category came after The Dark Knight failed to secure a nomination. At the time, the Academy acknowledged that less niche and more populist films would help the broadcast attract larger audiences, and that there was inherent value in at least considering commercially successful films for bigger awards.
"If I am quiet and express no opinions whatsoever, it's because the last time we did this show, I made the mistake of saying that with 10 Oscar nominations I thin it's weird that Spider-Man didn't get one," Smith joked. "Then three days later, I was treated like f---ing Hitler on the internet....I saw people tweeting s--t like 'You should have died with your heart attack.' I'm serious, people were f---ing mad, as if it was an outrageous hot take."
You can see the video below.
In the time since the 2009 change, the Academy Award has nominated films like Mad Max: Fury Road and Black Panther for some of the biggest awards, but those remain outliers.
"So if I seem a little circumspect tonight, it's because I don't want to be yelled at by strangers for suggesting that the movie could have been nominated -- not win! I never said it could win or should win," Smith explained.
Spider-Man: No Way Home is in theaters now, and will be headed to home media beginning on March 22. The film has been a box office phenomenon and, in addition to being well-reviewed, also earned some love from movie fans for helping to revitalize movie theaters, which have been suffering since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020.