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Despite the presence of a troika of web slingers past and present and a bonanza box office, Spider-Man: No Way Home was (basically) nowhere to be found amidst today’s Oscar nominations unveiling.

Even with a vigorous campaign to try to win over the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Tom Holland, Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire starrer just wasn’t able to overcome the enduring bias against superhero movies among voting members. Instead, the mandatory 10 movie Best Picture category will see Belfast, CODA, Don’t Look Up, Drive My Car, Dune, King Richard, Licorice Pizza, Nightmare Alley, The Power of the Dog and West Side Story battling it out for the big win at the 94th Academy Awards on March 27.

Related Story Oscar Nominations: The Complete List

Released on December 17 last year, the Sony-distributed and Jon Watts-directed No Way Home proved a double threat. First of all, the movie was much more widely praised by critics than the usual superpowered Hollywood effort. Additionally, ending the cinema drought that encompassed the past 18 months, the Spidey flick drew audiences back into theaters and smashed pandemic box office records to hit a worldwide haul of nearly $1.8 billion. A result that saw No Way Home swing up to the heights of being the top movie of 2021 and the sixth highest-grossing film ever.

Propelled by its acclaim and surging bottom line, the Zendaya and Benedict Cumberbatch co-starring Spider-Man: No Way Home had looked like a fair bet to replicate the Best Picture perch that fellow Marvel Cinematic Universe flick Black Panther achieved in 2019. However, unlike the multiverse themed latest Spider-Man film, the Ryan Coogler-directed tale of the late Chadwick Boseman portrayed T’Challa centered on crucial issues of racism, colonialism and geopolitics, to name a few.

Simply put, Black Panther was a clear inflection point in American culture in a way that Spider-Man: No Way Home just isn’t.

Now, in 2020, the Todd Philips’ helmed Joker snared a Best Picture slot along with 10 other nominations. Winning Best Actor for Joaquin Phoenix and Best Original Score for Hildur Guðnadóttir, the dank and gritty urban origin story of Batman’s clown nemesis was much more in the Oscar friendly vein of Taxi Driver than the vast majority of big screen caped crusader offerings.

Hell, Joker even co-starred Robert De Niro.

In point of fact, it was actually a Batman movie that prompted the Academy to open the Best Picture category up to 10 films.

The backlash to the absence of a Best Picture nomination for Christopher Nolan’s stunning The Dark Knight at the 81st Academy Awards torn open a long festering Oscars wound. To cauterize the situation, in 2009 it was announced that 10 films would be contenders for Best Picture at the Oscars going forward. A couple of years later that edict was augmented to a less strict standard of no more than 10 films. Flipping the script back again, the Academy decided that 2022 would have a guaranteed 10 Best Picture nominees.

Ten films that do not have Spider-Man: No Way Home on the list this morning.

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