While the 2022 Academy Awards will no doubt be remembered for Will Smith slapping Chris Rock live on television, fans of “Zack Snyder’s Justice League” will celebrate it for the four-hour film winning an award.
This year’s awards featured a new honorific category known as the #OscarsCheerMoment, celebrating a scene from a beloved movie as voted on by Twitter users.
The scene from “Zack Snyder’s Justice League” in which The Flash enters the Speed Force to reverse time received the most votes, winning the inaugural award, beating out the Spider-Man Team Up moment from “Spider-Man No Way Home,” Neo dodging bullets in “The Matrix,” Jennifer Hudson singing “And I’m Telling You” in “Dreamgirls,” and the Avengers Assemble moment in “Avengers: Endgame”.
It was a fine scene, let nothing distract from that. My umbrage is with the Academy and the Oscars’ further divorcing themselves from cinema as a whole. And creating a hashtag movement, while kinda fun, both admits the further movement toward “art films” while throwing a bone to the wider audience. It also, like the voting for the Razzies, more or less makes the “winner” the film which can marshal the largest social media presence (read: people with the most time on their hands). At one point the “popular film” was being led by the remake of Cinderella by the… Read more »