Just go ahead and hand the Oscar to “Black Panther.”
There’s little doubt that it’s the movie that will win the first Best Popular Movie category in this year’s Oscar race. A week or so ago, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced it would introduce the Best Popular Movie into the running, but it didn’t give any more details.
What criteria would go into the choosing of the movie? Amount of cash earned? Highest Rotten Tomatoes rating? Most social-media posts? The category is, after all, designed to get more people to care about the Oscars.
Some have heralded the new award, saying the Academy Awards have gotten too cerebral, too “high art,” too “important social commentary” in its Best Picture selection. Far and away, the majority of candidates in the category have leaned in the latter’s direction, although you certainly could argue that last year’s winner, “The Shape of Water,” was off the beaten path.
Since 2010, however, only a few films off that path have even been nominated, and usually only one a year – “Toy Story 3” in 2010, “Beasts of the Southern Wild” and “Life of Pi” in 2012, “Mad Max: Fury Road” in 2015, “Get Out” in 2017.