*“Black Panther” star Chadwick Boseman is among those confused by the Academy’s attempt to appease fans of overlooked box office blockbusters by introducing an Oscar for “outstanding achievement in popular film” at next February’s Academy Awards.
“We don’t know what it [the new prize] is, so I don’t know whether to be happy about it or not,” Boseman told The Hollywood Reporter’s ‘Awards Chatter’ podcast in an episode that went live on Wednesday. “What I can say is that there’s no campaign [that we are mounting] for popular film; like, if there’s a campaign, it’s for best picture, and that’s all there is to it.”
After becoming the year’s highest-grossing movie domestically and second-highest-grossing internationally to date, “Black Panther” may very well nab the popular Oscar. But the studio, which has hired veteran awards strategist Cynthia Swartz’s Strategy PR to orchestrate its Oscar campaign, is much more interested in the holy grail of best picture.
As far as Boseman is concerned, the new popular Oscar category should not deter Academy members from nominating a popular film in the best picture Oscar category. (The Academy has confirmed that films can be nominated in both categories.)
“A good movie is a good movie,” he says, “and clearly it doesn’t matter how much money a movie makes in order for it to be ‘a good movie’ [in the minds of Academy members] because if [it did], the movies that get nominated and win [which have tended in recent years to not be blockbusters] wouldn’t get nominated; and if it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter on both sides.” The actor adds, “For my money, the only thing that matters is the level of difficulty.”
Boseman continues: “What we did was very difficult. We created a world, we created a culture … we had to create a religion, a spirituality, a politics; we had to create an accent; we had to pull from different cultures to create clothing styles and hair styles. It’s very much like a period piece. … So, as far as that’s concerned, I dare any movie to try to compare to the [level of] difficulty of this one. And the fact that so many people liked it — if you just say it’s [merely] popular, that’s elitist.”
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