Let me start off by saying I loved Deadpool & Wolverine. It was easily the best superhero movie of 2024 and rightfully earned every dollar it made. However, it does not deserve an Oscar nomination.
The possible categories Deadpool & Wolverine had any chance for being nominated for could have been nominated for are Best Picture, Actor in a Leading Role, Actress in a Supporting Role, Writing (Adapted Screenplay), and Visual Effects. The rest, it had no chance of receiving a nomination for.
Below are the nominations for all the categories Deadpool & Wolverine could have been part of. If you’re already familiar with the nominations, feel free to skip the informative bit.
The nominations for Best Picture with a few expected nominations are Anora, The Brutalist, A Complete Unknown, Conclave, Dune: Part Two, Emilia Pérez, I’m Still Here, Nickel Boys, The Substance, and Wicked.
The nominations for Actor in a Leading Role are Adrien Brody, The Brutalist, Timothée Chalamet, A Complete Unknown, Colman Domingo, Sing Sing, Ralph Fiennes, Conclave, and Sebastian Stan, The Apprentice.
The nominations for Actress in a Supporting Role are Monica Barbaro, A Complete Unknown, Ariana Grande, Wicked, Felicity Jones, The Brutalist, Isabella Rossellini, and Conclave, Zoe Saldaña, Emilia Pérez.
The nominations for Writing (Adapted Screenplay) are A Complete Unknown, Conclave, Emilia Pérez, Nickel Boys, and Sing Sing.
The nominations for Visual Effects are Alien: Romulus, Better Man, Dune: Part Two, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, and Wicked.
End of the list of nominations.
The acting in Deadpool & Wolverine was solid. I have no problem with any of the acting in the entire movie, but was any of it Oscar worthy? No. Ryan Reynolds plays Deadpool perfectly and I absolutely love him for the role, but it doesn’t take the world’s best actor to play a profane, silly, violent individual. At first thought, one may feel the same about Hugh Jackman’s acting as Wolverine. Wolverine is mean, he growls and grunts a lot, and grumbles every word. However, there’s more to the character than that. The Wolverine we saw in the film was a haunted individual and Hugh Jackman did great with those moments. He also portrays the anger of Wolverine so well that it’s scary. Was it impressive? Yes. However, once again, was any of it Oscar worthy? No.
This continues into the category of Best Actress in a Supporting Role. Emma Corrin was fantastic as Cassandra Nova. Her strange, villainous mannerisms and quirks were portrayed very well. She delivered her lines with maximum effort, as Deadpool would say, and gave off perfect comic book movie vibes. Once again, while she did a great job, the acting is not worthy of an Oscar.
I debated on even including the category of Best Writing as one Deadpool & Wolverine could have been nominated for, but settled on including it if only to include the reasoning on why it would not win. The plot, if thought about for more than a few minutes, does not make any sense. Logan takes place in 2029. In the film, it says no mutants have been born in twenty five years. If Deadpool & Wolverine takes place after Logan’s death, presumably quite some time after his death as his corpse has completely rotted, then we get all sorts of continuity errors. If it takes place in the year it came out, 2024, then we get even more. On top of that, the movie breaks the whole idea of Incursions presented in Loki by letting two characters from different universes stay in Earth-10005. We could go on and on about the plot holes, writing conveniences, or contradictory decisions, but the fact of the matter is the writing is not Oscar worthy.
The visual effects of Deadpool & Wolverine are solid. I have no complaints about them at all. However, there isn’t anything particularly impressive about them. A large portion of the movie takes place in The Void, a location that is mostly flat and one color. The rest of it takes place at a car dealership, an apartment, Happy’s office, and the hideout for Elektra, Blade, Gambit, and Laura, locations that require little to no visual effects. The fight scenes also mostly required little or no visual effects. The last fight in the void definitely required some, but it was fairly minimal even with Gambit’s very cool charged playing cards.
If the movie isn’t able to be nominated for any of these categories, it is almost impossible for it to be nominated for Best Picture.
The other categories, Deadpool & Wolverine simply had no chance of winning. The set design relied heavily on CGI and, for the scenes that didn’t, the set design was fine but not award worthy. The costumes looked great, but also aren’t necessarily worthy of an award. I simply don’t know enough about makeup, hairstyling, and editing to comment there, but I imagine they follow the same theme as the rest of the movie: good, but not award worthy.
Again, it is necessary to communicate that I genuinely loved Deadpool & Wolverine. The movie is exactly what it wanted to be and nothing else. All it wanted to be was a team up movie and a movie in which Deadpool is given the full resources of Disney, and that’s exactly what it was. It isn’t the type of movie to sit down and analyze or think about for hours and hours afterwards, but it’s a grand time. The cameos weren’t gratuitous cameos for no reason like in The Flash; they served a purpose. They were a send off to an era of superhero movies that is now officially gone, but not forgotten. The movie is a ton of fun and deserved every dollar it made, but simply isn’t the kind of movie that’s going to win awards (unless a category for choreography is added, which it absolutely should be), and that is just fine.
What do you think about Deadpool & Wolverine not being included in any Oscar nominations? Let me know!