Should Top Gun Maverick Win The Oscar for Best Picture?
Greg Ehrhardt, OnScreen Blog Columnist
If you look at 2022 for movies collectively, this has been one of the least memorable movie years in recent memory (breaking news!)
Starting with the tentpole movies, which I’ll be honest, I had to look up to make sure I got everyone, I would only count four movies as being positively memorable: The Batman, Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness (barely), Nope, and, last, but definitely not least, Top Gun Maverick.
It is depressing to list the blockbusters that were flat out bad, so I won’t, but so many big releases failed to generate any type of positive buzz this year
Not the case with Top Gun Maverick, which not only was the #1 movie for the first 3 weeks of release, but was the #1 movie for two straight weeks 3 MONTHS after release!
Top Gun Maverick will go down as one of the most positively memorable movie experiences of the 21st century, so far, bar none.
What about the Oscar bait movies? Well, it is actually a really good year for the Best Picture nominees; 6 of the nominees have a real case to be Best Picture. However, only two of them did anything at the box office (Everything Everywhere All at Once did $73 million domestic), so it was a bad year in one sense of having movies nominated that people actually saw. (Nope, Avatar 2 does not have a case for Best Picture, in case you’re wondering)
And Top Gun Maverick is standing there waving, with a gazillion box office dollars, asking “What About Me??”
Well, what about Top Gun Maverick for Best Picture?
The case for it is it is truly a singular achievement in sound editing, sound mixing, and practical effects. And at some point, Hollywood needs to start recognizing those elements of film as vital to a great movie; otherwise, its just paying lip service to it every year when they talk about how crucial it is to a movie, but always select movies for Best Picture that don’t care one iota about special effects.
The case against it is, well, the story about as vanilla as it gets, the script is mediocre, and there isn’t one standout acting performance you can hang your hat on as being the cream of the crop, even this year’s crop.
The wild card though, is how satisfying the movie was to so many people. Even scouring the internet, where you can find curmudgeons who will find a way to hate any movie, its hard to find detractors of this movie. The Academy historically has never cared about this aspect, but should it?
In 2022, the answer might have to be yes, to course correct for how irrelevant the Best Picture Oscar has become.
The last movie to win best picture and gross more than $100 million domestic box office was Argo in 2012. It’s been 10 years since we’ve had a Best Picture Winner that’s had a decent amount of commercial appeal and was a unanimously liked crowd pleaser.
If you want to make the case for Top Gun Maverick in a vacuum, the best comp in recent history is Avatar in 2009. Avatar made $785 domestic box office and was viewed as a Best Picture contender and possible winner due to the groundbreaking innovations in 3D technology and how crowd pleasing it was.
Avatar, like Top Gun Maverick, featured a vanilla script and no note-worthy performances. But, it was a great movie because of how singular the visual effects were, and honestly, has a right to be the real best picture winner over The Hurt Locker. (Before you @ me, 2009 was a loaded year for movies, and 5 other movies were also deserving of Best Picture. The point is Avatar was so singular in visual excellence, and achieved so much in customer satisfaction, it has a legit claim to the title)
By the way, we should remind ourselves, Top Gun made $716 million domestically, as of this writing, with a $126 million opening weekend, and most importantly, the sound effects are just as ground breaking as the visual effects were for Avatar.
At some point, this stuff must matter as far as what was the best movie of the year.
Now, I’m not arguing that movie popularity should be a factor in the Academy votes (I’m on record with how stupid the fan vote is for the Oscars)
But, I am saying that the degree of difficulty of success for Top Gun Maverick to achieve what it did should be taken into account for Oscars voting.
Let’s say you give a top director two choices, with their life on the line:
Choice A: They have to either make a sequel to Top Gun one of the top 5 highest box office movies of all time
Choice B: They have to make a movie that will get a Best Picture nominee with their choice of top flight actor or actress.
Guess what, they will choose the best picture challenge every single time.
Ok, so enough foreplay, let’s get to the question at hand: should Top Gun Maverick win best picture in 2022?
You can make an easy case ‘Top Gun Maverick’ should win over all of the nominees except one, because most of the nominees weren’t made to appeal to general audiences, and that should matter in the final vote.
The real Best Picture contender that has a case against Top Gun Maverick, even by my criteria, is Everything Everywhere All at Once (or as I sometimes call it, the Petyr Baelish movie) The degree of difficulty of this picture is almost as high as Top Gun Maverick, it achieved decent box office without any type of movie star attached to it, it is exceptionally made with stellar visual effects, and it is just as satisfying as Top Gun Maverick.
In short, this movie excelled in many more areas of movie making than any of the other contenders, including Top Gun Maverick.
The script and dialogue writing of Top Gun Maverick will be its downfall for winning Best Picture, but it should be recognized for how good it a movie it is despite that, and how utterly thrilling a movie going experience it was to watch it in the theatre.
In the end, the point is this; movies were made to be watched, heard, and experienced in movie theatres, and the Academy should start rewarding movies who excel at that, and not rewarding movies where you get the same experience watching on your phone or living room.
In 2022, for the movie industry to survive, it needs more movies like Top Gun Maverick and not Tar or The Fablemans. For that reason, while Top Gun may not deserve Best Picture (after all, only one movie can win), it does deserve to be easily in the conversation without any debate.
One last thing: if Top Gun Maverick really wants to win the award, they should confirm the popular theory that Maverick died on that fighter jet early in the movie, because that gives a memorable movie an even more memorable payoff and will last in everyone’s collective movie memory for decades.
That’s what ultimately matters, beyond any Oscar win.