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Disney Begins Avengers: Endgame Oscar Campaign
Disney officially begins the Avengers: Endgame Oscar campaign by scheduling Academy screenings for the film. Last year, another MCU installment, Black Panther, broke the glass ceiling by becoming the first superhero film to earn a Best Picture nomination at the Oscars. Comic book adaptations received nominations and wins in major categories before (The Dark Knight and Logan are two notable examples), but Black Panther had the potential to be the real game-changer. With the Academy welcoming new membership, its nomination showed voters were open to recognizing more populist fare at the Oscars.
If a comic book film is going to crack the Best Picture lineup this awards season, the safe money would be on Joker, which surprisingly won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. But Avengers: Endgame, the highest-grossing film of all-time, is going to try to shake things up and parlay its status as the generation's defining cinematic event into prestigious accolades. Endgame will have the might of the Disney machine behind it on the campaign trail, and the movie's Oscar push is well underway.
Disney's official For Your Consideration website has been updated for 2019, and it includes a listing for screenings in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, and London. It's unknown what specific categories Disney is gunning for, but one would imagine they're campaigning for nominations across the board, including Picture, Director, and Actor (Robert Downey, Jr.).
Of course, Disney's site also features their other high-profile films from this year, including The Lion King and Aladdin. That Endgame is on the For Your Consideration page isn't anything out of the ordinary. This is standard practice for the film industry. That being said, Endgame is likely going to be the top priority for the Mouse House, similar to how Black Panther was last year. Not only did Endgame shatter multiple box office records during its unprecedented run, it also received strong reviews from critics that praised it as a poignant and moving sendoff for the first era of the MCU. There's no denying the impact the franchise had on Hollywood, so giving Endgame a Best Picture nomination could be seen as the Academy's way of acknowledging Marvel's accomplishments.
Marvel fans would undoubtedly love to see Endgame score major Oscar nods, but there's still a long way to go and history is not on the film's side. It remains to be seen if Black Panther was a case of lightning in a bottle or a harbinger of things to come, and there are a multitude of other films vying for top nominations themselves. As always, the competition is intense, so Disney has their work cut out for them if they're to pull this off. Like most Marvel movies before it, Avengers: Endgame may have to settle for a handful of tech nods, but Disney's going to try for something more.
Black Widow (2020) release date: May 01, 2020
Eternals (2020) release date: Nov 06, 2020
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021) release date: Feb 12, 2021
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2021) release date: May 07, 2021
Thor: Love and Thunder (2021) release date: Nov 05, 2021
Black Panther 2 (2022) release date: May 06, 2022
