Photo Credit: Getty Images
Joe Russo, co-director behind Marvel’s highest-grossing movies, is weighing in on what he says is a decades-long Hollywood bias in the award culture. Russo told The Sunday Times recently that franchise films have been relegated to the sidelines by the Oscars for decades — and he puts all the blame on Harvey Weinstein.
As Russo describes, the shift began in the 1990s when Weinstein, who was a force to be reckoned with in the industry at the time through Miramax, began launching vigorous Oscar campaigns for independent and “prestige” films. “Popular films were winning Oscars before the mid-‘90s,” Russo described. “Then Weinstein started mudslinging campaigns. He demonized mainstream films to justify the art films he fought for Oscar campaigns.”
Before this shift, major commercial blockbusters like Titanic, Forrest Gump, The Godfather, and Ben-Hur routinely took top prizes. But Russo believes Weinstein changed the game, portraying blockbusters as inferior art — a negativity that has since had an impact on Academy Awards voting.
That bias, Russo argues, has isolated the general public from awards season itself. “It affected how the audience views the Oscars, because they haven’t seen most of the movies,” he explained. “We’re in a tricky place. Something that we should all be enjoying and sharing together, we instead fistfight about.”
Russo’s remarks pour oil on a fight that’s gained more volume over the past several years: Is the Oscar relevant to the mainstream moviegoer anymore? Gross titans like Spider-Man: No Way Home or Top Gun: Maverick have been unable to crack upper categories despite their commercial and cultural relevance. When they do appear in the awards, they win Best Picture as rarely as your grandmother eats tofu.
Later during the same interview, Russo pushed back against the frequently expressed complaint that Marvel movies have been killing the cinema. “This thesis that Marvel movies were killing cinema. Well, Marvel movies seemed to be sustaining cinemas for quite a long period of time,” he said, citing how superhero films kept cinemagoers coming to theatres even in periods of industry slump.
Alongside his brother Anthony Russo, Joe has directed a few of the top-grossing films of all time like Avengers: Infinity War, Avengers: Endgame, Captain America: Civil War, and The Winter Soldier. The Russo Brothers are currently set to return to the Marvel Cinematic Universe for two more such high-risk endeavors: Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars, both of which are set to headline the next franchise iteration.
In addition to awards-season politics, Russo also sounded dismayed at the bigger state of the movie business. With box office returns sagging and streaming platforms redefining how audiences watch movies, he sees a divided industry. “Like everything, the film space has become divisive,” he said. “Everything is about who can be the loudest, who can clickbait the most.”
The problems facing Hollywood are more than any one awards ceremony. But Russo’s statement points to a long-standing frustration of blockbuster filmmakers: that despite their domination of global culture, their movies are still second-class art.
And until things change, Russo implies, the Oscars can keep on becoming irrelevant — not because audiences don’t care about movies, but because audiences care about the movies they see and aren’t being rewarded.
