So the Producer’s Guild of America nominations were announced yesterday. For those of you who aren’t as in the know on the awards circuit as I am (you know, those of you with lives), the PGAs are the best indicator of what the final Academy Award nominations are going to be. Surprise, surprise, The Dark Knight is nominated, meaning that the film has a serious shot as a best picture nomination.
I know that this is big news for a lot of people, but I’m afraid that I can’t look at this with anything but complete and utter dread. The Dark Knight should not, nay, must not, win Best Picture, for reasons that have nothing to do with my liking or not liking it.
This past year has been the culmination of what might be the decade’s defining cultural zeitgeist: the superhero film. It started when Bryan Singer’s X-Men outperformed expectations, then kicked into high-gear with Spider-man’s record-smashing $114 million opening, and then continuing with at least one major release in the genre every summer for the last seven years. In 2008 there were 4, 2 of them being lauded as the best that have been yet produced (Iron Man and The Dark Knight, though my heart still belongs to X2: X-Men United). And, you know, this could be nearly the end of it. There aren’t too many characters that haven’t found film representations (that anybody’s really going to see, anyway; I don’t think anyone’s clamoring for a Black Canary film), and, by golly, many people seem to think that they’ve just about reached their zenith with Knight.
I respectfully disagree. I appreciated Knight, acknowledge that it is the best live-action Batman film yet (even if the animated series still runs rings around it), and am glad that it pushed the genre in new directions. But in no way is this the best possible representation of the superhero that is possible in this marketplace. I mean, seriously, however much you might have liked this, are you not at least a little curious as to what Darren Aronofsky’s Batman: Year One would have been like? Would you seriously never want to see another Batman film because this one just got it so perfectly?
Which brings me to the best picture nomination. If The Dark Knight gets a best picture nomination, it will not be a vindication for all of the fanboys who have read The Long Halloween and Arkham Asylum. It will be a vindication for all of the people in the mainstream audience who have just, for the first time, acknowledged that comics could produce something at all interesting. It will be for all of the people who’ll only read Watchmen because it’s been placed on the front counter as a movie tie-in. And then, if this movie is nominated, let alone wins (after Crash, I’ll never say never), they’ll lose interest. They’ll move on to something else. They’ll leave saying that The Dark Knight is the best that the genre can ever be, and they’ll leave it at that.
Think of it this way: people were saying the same thing about Spider-man 2 four years ago. Can you imagine if that had been nominated, and they had just stopped there?
This is all hearsay and conjecture, and I could be wrong. Maybe it’ll win, and then graphic novels will finally become mainstream. But you know the thing about the mainstream? It kind of sucks. It produces films for people with no real interest in film. And that’s fine. But most of us are here because film is our thing, and it’s what we spend our free time involving ourselves in. The Oscars are not a reflection of that. They’re a reflection of institutionalized taste, of films that are made to win awards and respect, and, to a lesser extent, cure insomnia. I don’t think Batman needs that kind of approval. He’s already had the kind of approval he really needs.
