Tuesday morning, Oscar nominations 2019 were announced and for the first time in history a superhero movie is nominated for the best picture category which is ‘Black Panther’. 10 years after Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight” forced a significant paradigm shift at the Academy Awards, a superhero movie was finally nominated for best picture, Marvel’s “Black Panther.” And it represents a fairly remarkable culmination as it claimed nominations in a total of seven Oscar categories.
Black Panther has been nominated in the following categories for 2019 Oscar awards:
Best Picture
Sound mixing
Original score: Ludwig Goransson
Original song: “All The Stars” by Kendrick Lamar, SZA
Sound editing: Benjamin A. Burtt, Steve Boeddeker
Production Design: Hannah Beachler
Costume design: Ruth E. Carter
Black Panther dominated the box office collections in 2018, bringing in $1.3 billion worldwide including $700 million domestically, making it the biggest film of 2018 in the U.S.
Audiences around the world paid to see a huge tentpole fronted by an all-black cast — but became a cultural movement. And that’s certainly Best Picture material.
Black Panther claimed a few prizes along the way, too, winning the Critics’ Choice Awards for Best Costume Design, Best Production Design and Best Visual Effects and being named one of AFI’s Movies of the Year.
Although superhero films have been nominated (and even won) a few Academy Awards in technical categories like Best Sound and Visual Effects, the biggest night in Hollywood tends to sidestep the vigilante-filled genre, with a few exceptions. In 2018, James Mangold and Michael Green broke ground with a Best Adapted Screenplay nomination for the forever-underrated film, Logan.
In 2009, Heath Ledger won a posthumous Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his chilling portrayal of the comic book world’s most notorious villain — the Joker — in The Dark Knight. In total, Christopher Nolan’s Batman epic picked up eight nominations but missed out on Best Picture.
