Marvel Wants ‘Black Panther’ To Receive Best Picture Oscar Nomination, Chadwick Boseman Responds

Marvel says no thanks to an Academy Award for Best Popular Film.

Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige is doing everything in his power for the Academy to recognize “Black Panther” as a great work of film and not just a great Hollywood blockbuster.

“I would like to see the hard work and the effort and the vision and the belief of the talented filmmaker Ryan Coogler, who sat across the table from us a few years ago and said, ‘I have been wrestling with questions about my past and my heritage and I think I really want to tell a story within this movie,’” Feige said in a report by the Los Angeles Times.

“And that he did it so unbelievably well and with so much impact,” he continued. “Seeing that potentially being recognized is what excites me the most.”

According to the publication, Marvel Studios has invested in a “significant awards season budget” and Disney has hired veteran Oscar strategist Cynthia Swartz to lead the charge.

An anonymous Oscars consultant told the Times, “Right now, I think [Academy CEO] Dawn Hudson would crawl in a hole if ‘Black Panther’ gets snubbed for best picture and winds up landing in the popular film category.”

The Oscars received less than favourable reactions when they announced a new category called Best Popular Film to celebrate the top blockbuster movies of the year.

Lead actor Chadwick Boseman was asked about the Best Popular Film category while being interviewed on The Hollywood Reporter‘s “Awards Chatter” podcast, insisting: “We don’t know what it [the new prize] is, so I don’t know whether to be happy about it or not. What I can say is that there’s no campaign [that we are mounting] for popular film; like, if there’s a campaign, it’s for best picture, and that’s all there is to it.”

“A good movie is a good movie, and clearly it doesn’t matter how much money a movie makes in order for it to be ‘a good movie’ [in the minds of Academy members] because if [it did], the movies that get nominated and win [which have tended in recent years to not be blockbusters] wouldn’t get nominated; and if it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter on both sides. For my money, the only thing that matters is the level of difficulty.”

Boseman added of the much-talked about flick, “What we did was very difficult. We created a world, we created a culture… we had to create a religion, a spirituality, a politics; we had to create an accent; we had to pull from different cultures to create clothing styles and hair styles. It’s very much like a period piece. So, as far as that’s concerned, I dare any movie to try to compare to the [level of] difficulty of this one. And the fact that so many people liked it — if you just say it’s [merely] popular, that’s elitist.”