Just about every year, brilliant movies are utterly ignored by the Oscars. The Searchers, Groundhog Day, Breathless, King Kong, Casino Royale, Touch of Evil, Caddyshack, Mean Streets, The Big Lebowski — the Academy has a long history of overlooking comedies, action movies, horror flicks, hard-boiled genre pics, artsy foreign films, and documentaries that aren’t about World War II. This year, we’ll be taking a closer look at films that were too small, too weird, or perhaps simply too awesome for the Academy Awards. These are the Non-Nominees.
The Film: Chronicle, the found-footage superhero thriller/high school drama about a trio of teenagers who develop strange powers far beyond those of mortal men. Airborne football, awkward drunken hook-ups, and climatic telekinetic showdowns ensue.
Why it Wasn’t Nominated: “Found footage,” “superhero,” and “high school” is a unique hat trick of “Things The Oscars Do Not Pay Any Attention To.” The whole fake-found-footage style of filmmaking is, at this point, a debased concept in the movie universe. The Academy has been resolutely opposed to nominating big-studio superhero movies that earned critical acclaim and billions of dollars; it’s unlikely that they would be interested in a weird off-brand, no-costume, low-budget superhero riff. And the Academy has never paid much attention to movies about teenagers: They prefer movies about grown-ups or movies about childhood that treat childhood with an unabashedly nostalgic, old-man-looking-back-at-his-youth air (like Hugo or The Tree of Life or Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.) The Social Network is a rare example of a movie about young adults that earned lots of nominations, and Chronicle didn’t have the cachet of an Aaron Sorkin script, and anyways The Social Network lost to a movie about a stuttering Nazi-fighting, British king.
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