Is The Dark Knight the best film ever to get shut out of the Best Picture race? (Part I)

January 28, 12:07 AMAtlanta Movies ExaminerRyan McNally

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When the 2009 Oscar nominations were announced last week, there was a shocker in the Best Picture category: no Dark Knight. Considering the film’s universally strong performance (huge box office, excellent reviews, superb word of mouth) and guild support (Directors Guild, Producers Guild and Writers Guild nominations), a Best Picture nod seemed likely if not locked.

Of course, in the wake of the announcement, a storm was rained down on Internet message boards with the fury of the Joker unleashing his mayhem on Gotham City. Fanboys—and many movie aficionados in general—wondered for the umpteenth time how the Academy could be so out of touch.

Which brings us to the question: Is The Dark Knight the best film ever to be shut out of the Best Picture race? Is it even the best movie of the last 10 years not to score a Best Pic nod?

The difficulty with such arguments is that they inevitably fall back on personal opinion. One man’s Citizen Kane is another man’s Daddy Day Camp. Hell, search long enough and you’ll find people on the Web who hate on classics from The Godfather to The Shawshank Redemption to Casablanca.

There’s nothing wrong with debating a film’s Best Picture merits based solely on opinion—heck, it’s a lot of fun, and you can gain great insights into movies through the process—but message boards dedicated to the topic frequently devolve into pettiness. So rather than launching into the zillionth “Slumdog sucks”/”Button bites” tirade, what if we approached The Dark Knight from a more objective perspective, exploring a few measurable yardsticks?

Admittedly, it’s a little different than looking at, say, sports statistics. Athletes hit home runs, score touchdowns and grab rebounds, as opposed to the metrics we’ll use in this article, which are bestowed upon a film by third parties such as critics and audiences. But it’s still a worthy way to get the debate started.

OK, so how does The Dark Knight measure up? Let’s begin with user ratings among IMDB visitors. According to the IMDB, The Dark Knight is currently ranked the fifth greatest film of all-time, and is in fact the highest-rated film on the list not nominated for Best Picture. The next five highest-rated films to get the Best Picture cold shoulder are as follows:

9) The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
16) Rear Window (1954)
21) The Usual Suspects (1994)
22) Fight Club (1999)
23) Psycho (1960) 

Pretty strong company to say the least. Now let’s look at the American Film Institute’s “100 Years … 100 Movies—10th Anniversary Edition” to see what films from that list didn’t make the Academy’s Best Picture cut. The top five are:

5) Singin’ in the Rain (1950)
9) Vertigo (1958)
11) City Lights (1931)
12) The Searchers (1956)
14) Psycho (1960)

Wow, five films in the AFI’s all-time Top 15 didn’t even make the cut, to go with five films out of the IMDB’s Top 25 that were likewise snubbed.

What have we learned from looking at the two lists above?

1) There’s ample precedent for classic films not scoring a Best Picture nomination.
2) An immediate case can be made for Psycho as the best film ever excluded from the Best Pic race, as it appears on both shortlists.
3) It’s too early to judge The Dark Knight’s standing in film history. Will it hold up in 50 years like Vertigo, or even in 15 like The Usual Suspects?

But just because it’s too early to rank The Dark Knight’s spot in film history doesn’t mean we can’t compare it to movies from the last decade. And with the emergence of Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic—two Web sites that measure a film’s critical response—we have new objective tools at our disposal with which to compare films. So, is The Dark Knight the best film of the last decade not to hear its name called on the morning of Oscar nominations?

Read how The Dark Knight measures up in part two of this article.