In 2009, when the Academy Award nominations for films released in 2008 were announced, several netizens raised a hue and a cry over the exclusion of one film in particular from the Best Picture and Best Director category: Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, the second of his Batman trilogy of films. The film was the highest-grossing film of that year and was a critical favorite, and it was therefore argued by many that the reason for its exclusion was a deep-seated bias against films based on comic books.
It would appear that the Dark Knight backlash did not go unnoticed, as the next year the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences reinstated a practice that it had not used for decades; it expanded the field of Best Picture nominees to from five (5) to ten (10) nominees. As a result, the year after that, 2010, featured several commercial hits like Avatar, The Blind Side and District 9 vying for the top honor along with the usual "arthouse" fare. In 2011 the Academy nominated the work of the man whose omission from the 2009 awards was what caused so much uproar in the first place; Christopher Nolan's acclaimed science-fiction film Inception featured prominently that year with eight Academy Award nominations, including one for Best Picture, though Nolan was once again snubbed in the Best Director category.
Last year, the Academy showed that although the field for Best Picture had expanded, the awards were not about fulfilling populist expectations, as none of the nominees from that year's field of nine could really be described as a blockbuster hit. In fact, of all nine films, only one, had even grossed over $100 million in North America, usually viewed as the minimum benchmark for whether a film is a commercial success or not.
This year, 2013 could have been a benchmark year for films based on comic books in terms of recognition. In May of 2012, Marvel's The Avengers not only shattered box-office records but impressed critics the world over.
And then, the Dark Knight/Nolan fanboys struck.
While The Avengers knocked down record after record and was celebrated as a global phenomenon (with an eventual $1.5 billion gross), Dark Knight/Nolan fanboys infested movie and pop-culture related websites like aintitcool.com and comingsoon.net as well as Facebook pages of sites like boxofficemojo.com shouting at the top of their proverbial lungs that none of these records would matter once The Dark Knight Rises came out in July because it would destroy them all. It was annoying, but to anyone who had sat through their first wave of obnoxiousness in 2008, it was entirely expected.
When The Dark Knight Rises started screening for critics around the world, reviews started trickling in, many of which were posted on the online review aggregator rottentomatoes.com, and were quite overwhelmingly positive. However, they were not unanimously so.
And this was when the fanboys went from annoying to absolutely ridiculous.
When two reviewers whose names I forget dared to post negative reviews of The Dark Knights Rises, each of their reviews on RT was inundated with hundreds of hate messages, almost entirely from fans who, unlike the reviewers, had not actually seen the film, most of which were infantile, and more than a few of which were apparently rather alarming. These comments included death threats and more than a few obscenities which were apparently so menacing that the site administrators saw fit to disable the commenting section for several days. The unpleasant incident was reported by several online media outlets.
Then, of course, the Aurora, Colorado shooting happened during a regular screening of The Dark Knight Rises, and the empty threats of fans hiding behind their keyboards became trivial in comparison to this very real act of senseless violence.
...to be continued...
No comments:
Post a Comment