Warner Brothers Wants Oscar Gold for Wonder Woman.

Well… as my father used to say: it’s good to want.

Variety reports that the studio is considering a “formidable awards-season campaign” for the film, targeting both a Best Picture nomination for the film and Best Director nomination for Patty Jenkins. To date, only four women have been nominated for the Best Director Oscar: Lina Wertmüller (Seven Beauties), Jane Campion (The Piano), Sofia Coppola (Lost in Translation), and Kathryn Bigelow (Zero Dark Thirty), with Bigelow being the only winner. Jenkins’ first film, Monster, secured Charlize Theron her own Best Actress Academy Award.

And if Warner Brothers was merely fighting on the woman director front I might believe that such a contest would work.  Unfortunately, Wonder Woman is laboring under a far more onerous restriction: it’s a genre movie. Worse, it’s a superhero movie. The Academy hates having to take genre flicks seriously.  It took three years of mega-hits and utter cultural domination before it would admit that the Lord of the Rings trilogy deserved proper recognition; Heath Ledger would have never gotten his Oscar except posthumously; and even when a movie like Arrival gets into the nominations list it’s still instructive to see what those kinds of movies get to win.  I’ll save you the trouble of looking up Arrival: eight nominations (including Picture, Screenplay, and Director): it won… Best Sound Editing.

Look, I think Wonder Woman’s Oscar-worthy. And clearly Warner Brothers knows better than I do on what’s the best strategy for ramming through a nomination or two.  But I wouldn’t keep my hopes up.