Joe Russo, one-half of the sibling powerhouse producing/directing team known as the Russo Brothers, posited that today’s blockbuster versus indie discourse is in large part to Harvey Weinstein‘s Oscars campaign playbook.
In a new interview with the U.K.’s The Sunday Times, Russo lamented that popular films’ success at the box office and disproportional losses at the Academy Awards is due to a trend started by the disgraced mogul.
“This trend was started by Harvey Weinstein,” he said. “He vilified mainstream movies to champion the art films he pushed for Oscar campaigns. Popular films were winning Oscars before the mid-Nineties, then Weinstein started mudslinging campaigns … It affected how audiences view the Oscars, because they’ve not seen most of the movies. We’re in a complicated place. Things we should all enjoying collectively we instead punch each other in the face over.”
The Avengers: Endgame co-director added, “Like this argument that Marvel movies were killing cinema. Well, Marvel movies seemed to be keeping cinemas open for quite a long time.”
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To be fair, the cinematic blockbuster as moviegoers and filmmakers have known it three decades ago has changed drastically. The top-grossing films of the ’90s, such as Titanic and Jurassic Park, had budgets that would cower in the face of the $300 million+ figures now seen from such fares as the Russo Brothers’ The Electric State, now streaming on Netflix. A number of them, like Star Wars: Episode 1 – The Phantom Menace, Armageddon and Independence Day, were also solely nominated in craft categories, like Best Sound Mixing, Visual Editing and Visual Effects. Of course, other projects, including Forrest Gump, The Sixth Sense and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, received plenty of recognition in other Oscars denominations.
And Marvel has seen its fair share of Academy nods, largely in the Visual Effects category, including for Black Panther, which won three Oscars. All three Iron Man films have been nominated, as have all the Avengers installments, Doctor Strange, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings and Spider-Man: No Way Home.
According to a 2022 Wall Street Journal poll, more than half of all people surveyed hadn’t seen any of the 10 films nominated for Best Picture, while 40% said they didn’t believe Oscar winners reflected public opinion. It’s a debate that has long simmered since the cultural and capital domination of the ever-expanding MCU began in the early 2010s. However, the Academy has largely sided on quality over (monetary/audience) quantity.
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