The Oscars are embracing better movies. The show acts like it’s embarrassed by them

You might have noticed some social-media chatter several weeks ago about how everyone’s favorite guessing game suddenly wasn’t fun anymore — that it had tilted in a pretentious new direction. To quote ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, bemoaning that “No Way Home” didn’t get a best picture nomination while “Don’t Look Up” did: “When did we decide that the best picture has to be serious?” While I agree with Kimmel that “Don’t Look Up” doesn’t belong in the best picture race, a rambunctious, heavily improvised Adam McKay satire is an odd nominee to single out as proof of the academy’s chronic humorlessness. I don’t mean to make a gratuitous target of “No Way Home,” a movie I enjoyed perfectly well and like better than a few of this year’s best picture nominees, if not as much as other Oscar-winning films of its comic-book ilk, like “Black Panther,” “Joker” and “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.” Whatever you think of this latest and most lucrative of Spidey adventures, most of the arguments for its alleged Oscar-worthiness rest on a tiresome canard that equates popularity with quality, ubiquitousness with greatness. “Everyone’s seen this movie” is exaggerated to mean “Everyone likes this movie,” and “Everyone likes this movie” is stretched further to suggest that “This movie is the best.” Arriving at the end of a year when the COVID-19 pandemic continued to exact a toll on exhibitor revenues, “No Way Home’s” trio of Spider-Men have been recast as box office saviors, giving hurting theaters the billion-dollar adrenaline shot they needed. Clearly, one that couldn’t be more desperate to correct its perceived irrelevance, which apparently means ensuring that “Spider-Man: No Way Home” gets some sort of recognition during the telecast.