So the thing about Black Panther is this, and ahead are spoilers for Black Panther so tread carefully those who haven't seen:

Spoiler
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Blank Panther is a pretty good action film for the first 40 minutes of runtime. Then it hits its weightier themes and gives development and resonance to Killmonger that's incredibly good. Then... it becomes a generic action flick.

There are a lot of tremendous things done in Black Panther, a great many of them in the production design - I remarked when I left that it felt like it was calling back to a lineage of Afrofuturist mainstream films that don't actually exist, it was that confident with what it presented. There are also some truly weak elements, particularly W'Kabi's defection - a deleted scene "explains" it in a way that just shows how truly hollow it was.


It is a good movie, and I hope it'll spur more productions to be so ambitious and recognize the untapped potential of the artists who brought it to life and those waiting in the wings for their shot. It's not Best Picture.

Now mind you, many of the films that the Oscars choose to honor aren't, particularly. A notable thing happened beginning with the 82nd Academy Awards in 2009, and it's because of what they messed up the year prior: Best Picture expanded beyond five nominees. This was driven by two notable snubs in the same year: WALL-E, which was a critical darling well-received by audiences, and The Dark Knight, which... likewise. That year, the slate of nominees was Slumdog Millionaire, Benjamin Button, Milk, Frost/Nixon, and The Reader. I really enjoyed Frost/Nixon. I didn't enjoy it more than The Dark Knight or WALL-E.

So they expanded the slate and made sure to include "popular" films, which is how you end up with the following. Note "traditional" nominees are in bold.

Spoiler: 2009
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• The Hurt Locker (winner)
• The Blind Side
• Avatar (borderline, but a big effects-driven Dances With Wolves does hit some buttons)
• District 9
• An Education
• Inglourious Basterds
• Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' bu Sapphire
• A Serious Man
• Up
• Up in the Air


Spoiler: 2010
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• The King's Speech (winner)
• 127 Hours
• Black Swan
• The Fighter
• Inception
• The Kids Are All Right
• The Social Network
• Toy Story 3
• True Grit
• Winter's Bone


Spoiler: 2011
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• The Artist (winner)
• The Descendants
• Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
• The Help
• Hugo
• Midnight in Paris
• Moneyball
• The Tree of Life
• War Horse


Spoiler: 2012
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• Argo (winner)
• Amour
• Beasts of the Southern Wild
• Django Unchained
• Les Miserables
• Life of Pi
• Lincoln
• Silver Linings Playbook
• Zero Dark Thirty


You can see they started to close ranks pretty much immediately, because studios lobby for Best Picture with their little prestige films nobody went to see. They lobby super hard for the nominations. The impact of individual films is thinned. Compare the field in 1994:

Spoiler: 1994
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• Forrest Gump (winner)
• Four Weddings and a Funeral
• Pulp Fiction
• Quiz Show
• The Shawshank Redemption


The winner is easily from the bottom two of that field, and is still an impactful film. Quiz Show is likely the least known of the five, and is still a tremendous and interesting story and classic Oscar-type film. The Shawshank Redemption is the best film to get jilted for all kinds of big awards - it's unreal how hard it was shut out considering how good it is. Pulp Fiction is of course Tarantino at peak Tarantino.

So the Oscars have drifted away from "best movie" to "best Oscar-type movie" and went through a flirtation with lying about it, the product of which is Black Panther getting a nomination for an award it never had a chance of winning, because the producers fear loss of audience share and relevance. All that being said, neither Black Panther nor Avengers: Endgame was the best movie of its year. They were movies that came with a big impact, to be sure, but Endgame is a greatest hits album that asks you to see over 20 other films as the price of admission. It's the last episode of the most expensive TV show ever made. Black Panther has a rich creative vision kept in check by the metastory standards it has to keep its eye on.