Suicide Squad won an Academy Award for Best Makeup and Hairstyling last night. It was certainly appropriate because there was a lot of makeup and hairstyling in the movie. And…it was different. However, Suicide Squad now having won as many Oscars as Citizen Kane is still a harsh reality many are just now coming to grips with. Vulture’s Kyle Buchanon has aleady laid out the horrifying possibilty, but others are still reeling.
“Having this realization that Suicide Squad is an Oscar winning film was really just a surreal moment,” said Timmy Kiddlehoffer of White Plains, NY. “It still doesn’t make sense.”
“How am I feeling? Wow.. disgusted. nauseous and honestly like I’m in a nightmare,” wrote Janet Spammerwhack on Facebook.
“David Lynch has never won an Oscar, yet Suicide Squad, a loud, senseless movie that had to have reshoots just so Margot Robbie’s butt would make sense, is a victor,” warned Zia Padora, editor in chief of the influential site The Super Hero Endoscope, which covers genre films. “This is a film where someone wrote ‘Damaged’ in cursive script on Jared Leto’s forehead, and Cara Delevingne was hidden behind a hair curtain. And it won. An Oscar.”
Superhero/comic book movies winning Oscars isn’t unprecedented, as this IMDB list reveals. The first Superman won for Best VIsual Effects (or whatever they were called then.) Batman (1989) won for Art Direction. Spider-Man 2 won for Visual Effects. The Dark Knight won for Best Supporting Actor (still the only acting win or even nomination for a comic book movie) and Sound Editing.
So there you have it.
Five Four superhero movies have won Oscars. And one of them is Suicide Squad.
“We will resist,” vowed Padora. “We will keep fighting and our voices will be heard. This is not my Oscar™.”
Wow, what an overreaction. I thought the movie sucked, but the Oscar makes sense. It’s not like this is the first bad movie to win an Oscar either. This is false internet outrage at its finest.
This is trolling at its finest!
Either that or you don’t read this site much.
I just want to take a moment to celebrate Moonlight’s win. The year’s best film takes home the top prize. I’m sad it had to happen in such an awkward fashion, but perhaps all that discussion will spur more people to venture forth and take in this bold, vital piece of filmmaking.
The fact that it won over Star Trek Beyond is the real injustice. Killer Croc was the only impressive makeup in Suicide Squad. Star Trek Beyond had several characters who were just as impressive, if not more so.
Big Hero 6
Best Animated Feature, 2015
Don’t feel too bad…. nobody noticed it then.
Marvel even ignored it, by not greenlighting any other tween-friendly animated films like, say, Ms. Marvel or Squirrel Girl.
They even took them THREE YEARS to develop the property for television.
6.5: Hugo (2011) (VFX)
7. Dick Tracy (1990) (Best Song)
Torsten, I specifically excluded Big Hero Six and The Incredibles and non-superhero movies like Dick Tracy. Animated features are held to completely different standards and categories than live action films. I also wanted to specifically spotlight superhero movies, as comics based films are a much larger and more nebulous concept.
I believe that Ghost World and American Splendor are the two comics-based movie to get CLOSE to a major win – both were nominated in the BEst SCreenplay category. Neither won but American Splendor did win the WGA Award.
The Batman, Dark Knight and Dick Tracy wins are the only “major” categories for a comics based film I can think of. But I’m sure someone will be along to correct me.
I just watched Suicide Squad a few weeks ago as don’t movie theatres due to various injuries for a motorcycle accident quite a ways back. What surprised me was how faithful it was to certainly at least the last decade worth of source material which frankly every writer likes to throw everything into a story line.
And if you’ve watched the animated Assault on Arkham Asylum that that came out in ’14, there was a number of plot elements such as the Suicide Squad member getting killed off in a messy manner and Deadshot being protective of his family that they shared..
Was it a near perfect Suicide Squad film? From my viewpoint, yes.
Oh and it gets bonus points for the scariest scene with The Joker in any film so far…
Road to Perdition won one as well.
I for one loved the title of this piece.
I’m far more aggrieved that ZOOTOPIA got Best Animated Feature.
I haven’t seen any of the other nominees, yet as Thoth is My Witness, all of them MUST have been better than ZOOTOPIA.
I will point to this as one of the de facto analyses on why Sucide Squad is a travesty: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDclQowcE9I
That said, I didn’t mind the promotional aesthetic of the film (the movie itself is dark and muddy as all get out and almost unwatchable at points due to the awful color grading).
And finally, despite the DC snafus, this has been a huge year for film. Many of the nominees this year were wonderful and Moonlight, La La Land, and Arrival are all some of my favorite films of all time. I’m really happy to see them acknowledged– Moonlight in particular– given its intersectionality and relevance to the time we live in.
Wait…no Marvel movie has won an oscar for anything? Is this true?
“However, Suicide Squad now having won as many Oscars as Citizen Kane is still a harsh reality many are just now coming to grips with.”
There are geeks who regard SUICIDE SQUAD as a better movie than CITIZEN KANE (which they’ve probably never watched all the way through). Horrifying but true.
At least it didn’t win for its screenplay or editing. That would have been truly nauseating.
“I just want to take a moment to celebrate Moonlight’s win.”
I still haven’t seen MOONLIGHT (one of these days). Of the nominees that I saw, HELL OR HIGH WATER was the best.
I also thought FENCES and MANCHESTER BY THE SEA were better movies than LA LA LAND — which I liked just fine, but Best Picture? I could live with it winning, and I can live with it actually not winning.
“Wait…no Marvel movie has won an oscar for anything? Is this true?”
Marvel’s “movies” should be nominated for Emmys, because they’re more like long TV episodes than cinema.
Jimmy, I don’t believe so. They’ve been nominated a few times, for Best Visual Effects mostly, though Guardians was nominated for Best Makeup and Hairstyling as well, while Iron Man was up for Best Sound Editing. None have won thus far unless my memory is totally failing me (highly possible).
To a certain extent, there’s an argument to be made that Best Visual Effects is the “Best Picture of Blockbusters”.
George, you know how I feel about that Hell Or High Water, great film that I’m glad they thought enough of to recognize with a nod. If The Lobster wasn’t around, it would have been my personal pick for Best Original Screenplay.
Oh Heidi, I didn’t think you were overreacting, just that those comments you mentioned were. You know me, I’ve been with The Beat since the beginning and before.
Spider-man 2 won an Oscar for Best Visual Effects. It’s not MCU, but it is Marvel.
The only nerd movie that won big at the Oscars was Return of the King which won Best PIcture and 10 others, tied for most ever. Sort of a “lifetime achievement” for making one big nine hour movie. Avatar got beat by The Hurt Locker. Star Wars won six including Best Editing and Best Score. Duh.
The fact that Avatar is actually a franchise is absolutely mind-boggling.
It’s like trying to make “fetch” happen.
Comments are closed.