On its face, celebrating the year’s most popular films during the Academy Awards makes perfect sense — movies are a popular art, after all. But when the Academy announced that it would celebrate the Fan Favorite movies of 2021 with a Twitter poll, anyone who has spent roughly 15 minutes on Twitter could have predicted things would get weird.
Narrator: “They got weird.”
On Monday, the Academy announced 10 movies that made the cut for the #OscarsFanFavorite Leaderboard, selected via hashtags and submissions on an Academy website. “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” of course, made the list — the $1.8 billion-grossing blockbuster’s lack of Oscars nominations beyond visual effects was seen by many as the catalyst for this Fan Favorite initiative in the first place.
Presenting your #OscarsFanFavorite leaderboard. Continue casting your vote by:
1. Tweeting your favorite film from 2021 with the hashtag #OscarsFanFavorite
2. OR by voting on https://t.co/dadD2i7Cy0Voting closes on Thursday, March 3rd. pic.twitter.com/dqAOqFEXSy
— The Academy (@TheAcademy) February 28, 2022
The rest of the list, however, is… odd. It does make sense that “Dune,” the highest-grossing best picture nominee with $400 million worldwide, would make the cut. But so did the top Oscar nominee of the year, “The Power of the Dog,” which has won wide acclaim but has only cracked Netflix’s Global Top 10 three times, most recently after the nomination announcement, when it got all the way up to ninth place. Also curious: The musical “Tick, Tick … Boom!”, starring best actor nominee (and “No Way Home” co-star) Andrew Garfield, has never made Netflix’s weekly Global Top 10, but it did make the Fan Favorite Leaderboard.
The popular animated film “Sing 2” made the cut, but no other animated films did, including Disney’s “Encanto,” the source of one of the most popular songs of 2021, “We Don’t Talk About Bruno.” Actually, no Disney films at all made the list: Not Marvel Studios releases “Shang-Chi” or “Black Widow,” not “Cruella” with Emma Stone or “Jungle Cruise” with the Rock.
Instead, the R-rated “The Suicide Squad” — which spawned the popular HBO Max series “Peacemaker,” but grossly underperformed at the box office — is the only other superhero movie to be among the Fan Favorites. Its joined by the horror film “Malignant,” the jukebox musical “Cinderella,” the zombie action horror film “Army of the Dead” and the period biopic “Minamata.”
You know, “Minamata,” the Johnny Depp vehicle that debuted at the 2020 Berlin Film Festival right before the pandemic that barely any human person has seen. Last July, the film’s director, Andrew Levitas, accused MGM of attempting to “bury” his movie due to Depp’s high profile legal battles over allegations of abuse by his ex-wife Amber Heard, which also cost Depp his role in the third “Fantastic Beasts” movie. Intentional or not, “Minamata” — about how American photographer Eugene Smith documented the effects of severe mercury poisoning in the titular Japanese coastal town — was, indeed, buried, opening in a small handful of international territories in 2021. It just debuted in limited release domestically on Feb. 11.
And yet, despite being nearly impossible for most people in the world to see the film, “Minamata” is among the 10 films eligible for Fan Favorite recognition at the 2021 Oscars.
That is due to Depp’s highly organized and extremely online fandom, who have rallied to support the actor throughout his career downswing. Similar campaigns have also evidently been waged by fans of “Cinderella” star Camila Cabello and “Army of the Dead” director Zack Snyder, who have flooded Twitter with near identical tweets endorsing the respective films for Fan Favorite consideration. (“Army of the Dead” may have also benefitted from the fact that Snyder’s other 2021 release, “Zack Snyder’s Justice League,” is ineligible for Fan Favorite consideration because its exclusive release on HBO Max precluded it from Oscar consideration.)
None of this is intrinsically bad — these fans are merely exercising their skills to boost the projects, and people, they most want to succeed. Indeed, this kind of irrepressible dedication has become common currency on social media, especially Twitter, where even relatively small fandoms can generate tidal waves of digital buzz with a mix of dogged coordination and — allegedly — bots. So it should not have surprised anyone at the Academy that Twitter-native fandoms would flood the Fan Favorite initiative with movies that might not actually reflect the full breadth of popular cinema in 2021.
As current Academy president David Rubin said to Deadline about these aggressive Fan Favorite campaigns, “Well, enthusiasm is enthusiasm.”
That is true. But it also suggests an absurd lack of awareness by the Academy about what it means to promise online fandoms recognition on the Oscar stage, as close to mainstream acceptance as one could possibly find. The fevered enthusiasm that drives fans to barnstorm for their chosen favorites can curdle all too quickly into rigid — even toxic — intensity when things don’t turn out as expected. Already, some fans are pitting themselves against each other, quote tweeting votes for one movie with votes for another.
If “No Way Home” ends up “winning” the vote, as expected, will fans of Depp and Snyder who poured so much time and expectation into a Twitter poll feel like they were invited into the Oscars process, or spurned by it? Conversely, if “Minamata” or “Cinderella” prevails, will the wider audience, and Academy voters, think this initiative really demonstrated which movie was the biggest fan favorite of the year? Or will it just prove which fans are best at Twitter?