Why Joker Only Won 2 Oscars (Despite Having The Most Nominations)

Despite having 11 Oscar nominations, Joker only took home two awards, but this was largely to be expected. The Academy Awards are over for yet another year and, for a change, the vast majority of people seem truly delighted with the evening’s big wins. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite made history by becoming the first film not in the English language to take home Best Picture, while director Bong himself now has no fewer than four Oscars on his shelf, including Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best International Film. Outside of Parasite’s domination, however, the 92^nd Oscars were mostly pretty predictable, but in a good way. There were no wins that proved controversial or divisive like last year’s Best Picture win for Green Book.

For fans of Joker, Todd Phillips and Joaquin Phoenix’s comic book drama, it may have been a disappointing night. Despite storming ahead in the Oscar nominations with eleven nods to its name, the film only took home two awards: Best Actor for Phoenix and Best Original Score for Hildur Guðnadóttir. The movie entered the evening as the most nominated film of the 2019 season, beating tough competition like Sam Mendes’s war drama 1917, Martin Scorsese’s melancholy gangster story The Irishman, and Quentin Tarantino’s love letter to the industry, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

The eleven nods proved controversial for some, but all things considered, it wasn’t that much of a surprise. Warner Bros. ran an extremely savvy campaign for the film, it received a lot of love on the festival circuit (including winning the prestigious Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival), and it contained many of the creative and thematic elements that the Academy loves to reward. Still, the evening was always going to be a tough race for Joker and ultimately the chances of a clean sweep or anything remotely close to that were essentially non-existent.

The Competition Was Tough This Year

Joker was always going to have a tough time breaking through with major wins, even with all those nominations in its favor. 2019 was a stellar year in film and the nominations showed an exciting slice of what was on offer, from 1917 to Marriage Story to Little Women to Parasite and much more. It was always unlikely that one film would sweep all the categories, akin to Titanic or Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. That meant that the awards would be more evenly spread out, and that gave us some much-needed variety with the wins. Parasite took home more awards than any other film with four, while both Ford v Ferrari and 1917, extremely ambitious and complicatedly constructed films, did well in technical categories. Categories where Joker featured heavily, such as sound, editing, and costume, had to compete with more traditional offerings that fit better with Academy sensibilities. For example, Joker’s costuming is excellent but voters tend to favor old-school period drama styling, petticoats and all, so of course, Little Women won here.

There were really only two categories where Joker’s success was guaranteed and those were the awards it won. Joaquin Phoenix swept all the major awards this season for his leading performance, while Hildur Guðnadóttir achieved similar success for her score. These were the two parts of Joker that everyone, including non-fans of the movie, could agree were excellent and worth rallying behind for the win. Being a consensus pick has always benefitted Oscar nominees in some capacity and this was no exception as it related to Joker. It didn’t hurt that so much of the movie’s campaigning strategy focused so specifically on Phoenix and Guðnadóttir as the established and breakout star of Joker respectively.

For Joker, The Nominations Were the Win

For Warner Bros., the fact that Joker even made its way to the Oscars was victory enough. They spent many months crafting the perfect narrative for this film to ensure that it achieved not only staggering commercial success (it’s the first R-rated movie to ever gross $1 billion worldwide) but a level of industry-wide prestige that would allow it to be placed alongside more traditional awards bait. Joker may have been a very serious drama about very serious issues, one that pays homage to the works of Martin Scorsese, but it’s still a comic book movie about a Batman villain, so Warner Bros. always faced an uphill climb in getting the Academy to acknowledge their efforts.

For many, those Joker nominations are as significant a breakout for the superhero and comic book movie genres as the multiple nods and wins that Marvel’s Black Panther received last year. It signaled a real turning of the tides with the Academy’s notorious distaste for such stories softening in favor of opening the doors for more mainstream genre-focused works. Joker didn’t need to win any awards last night for that breakthrough to happen, but the two they did receive are further testament to that. Besides, at least it won something. Spare a thought for The Irishman, which tragically walked away empty-handed despite its ten nominations.

About The Author

Kayleigh Donaldson
(473 Articles Published)

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Kayleigh Donaldson is a full-time pop culture and film writer from Scotland. A features contributor to Screen Rant, her work can also be found regularly on Pajiba and SYFY FANGRRLS. She also co-hosts The Hollywood Read podcast. Her favorite topics include star studies, classic Hollywood, box office analysis, industry gossip, and caring way too much about the Oscars. She can mostly be found on Twitter at @Ceilidhann.

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