Yes, Top Gun: Maverick Is “Best Picture” Worthy, but Earning a Spot in Top Ten Is Tricky

The Best Picture race is not hard to figure out. It’s a system that can be easily gamed if you know your voters. It isn’t exactly rocket science figuring out which films they will choose in the end when looking at the array of options. As a result, it is often disappointing that it becomes such a limited selection, given the possibilities. This Academy, even after adding more members who are young and many of them international voters, is less concerned with movies that resonate with the public as it seems to be with films that resonate with more sophisticated filmgoers or the hive mind of critics.

Drive My Car vs. Spider-Man: No Way Home is probably your best example, but there are plenty of others. It wouldn’t really matter if the situation weren’t so dire. But the situation is, indeed, dire.

The Oscars have evolved from being one of the industry’s most powerful publicity tools to becoming something more like a stamp of quality to represent the ideology of Hollywood. Think of it like McDonald’s selling salads to show they care about offering healthy options. Most people aren’t going there to eat salad and everyone knows it, but just showing they care enough to offer those options allows them to continue to make money selling burgers.

There is a growing chasm between the mainstream American public and the increasingly niche media, which includes film critics, outlets like The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, etc. The class of people who still read those outlets are your target demo for the Oscars. As long as the Academy gets good press for choosing movies like Drive My Car, or Nomadland or any other critically acclaimed (and inclusive, above all) movie, they aren’t going to change nor feel any need to change.

If you remove box office as a measure of success, and you don’t really care what the invisible majority thinks, you can basically exist inside your own utopian bubble. And that is where we find ourselves now, in the summer of 2022, when a movie has captivated audiences with an A+ CinemaScore and an insane Rotten Tomatoes rating from critics and audiences:

After hearing all of the hype about Top Gun: Maverick, I finally went to see it in an actual movie theater. I wasn’t expecting it to be good. I was expecting decent. I wasn’t expecting a movie I never wanted to end because it was so enjoyable. There is no scenario that this doesn’t become one of the most memorable and beloved movies of 2022. It isn’t just the movie itself, which is as pitch perfect and as satisfying as the movies I was lucky enough to grow up with in the ’80s and ’90s before movies died (or mostly died). It’s also about the moment.

We are all coming out of our peak-COVID trauma and trying to piece together our lives. This is not a good time in this country. We’re headed into a recession probably, gas prices are high, and inflation is becoming a worse nightmare, not to mention the everyday horrors in the news. We’re barely holding on as a country, barely holding onto ourselves.

What we need is what Hollywood has always promised: a way to escape all of that. When I think of what should define “Best Picture of the Year,” I have to factor in what a film means in a given year. There are many promising films yet to come this year, many that are worth getting excited about. We won’t know what those movies are or where Top Gun: Maverick will fit into the final rankings.

That’s not to say this film is like Drive My Car or anything. It isn’t going to make you think about your own mortality or your relationships or life’s meaning. It doesn’t really have depth beyond what it is. But what it IS is nothing short of spectacular. It is a major reason why movies exist. It is why people pay money to see them. It is why they have such a permanent place in our collective hearts and minds and it is why the best crowd-pleasers do not divide but rather unite.

Top Gun: Maverick lives up to the hype and surpasses it because it does what it was designed to do: it gives its viewers everything they expect and does so almost effortlessly. It’s a movie that understands its formula and doesn’t mess with it. Those who say the movie isn’t “woke” are mostly right. It doesn’t upend the traditional “hero’s journey,” which is a central male figure is called to action who eventually saves the day. But it is inclusive in its casting and gives a female pilot, the wonderful Monica Barbaro, a spot on a crucial mission. I myself didn’t find that particularly realistic. I think they’d have gone with an all-male flight crew, but it doesn’t matter — most of what happens in the film is fantastical anyway.

The success of this film is in remaining close to what worked about the original Top Gun, being sure to put in the leather jackets, the helmet-less motorcycle rides, a landing on an aircraft carrier, etc. They don’t reinvent the wheel. They give their audience exactly what it wants and then some. They have all the same types returning: a girlfriend for Tom Cruise, a Val Kilmer-like cocksure pilot portrayed by Glen Powell (Kilmer also returns as Iceman)— Anthony Edwards’ Goose has died but his son is back and an accomplished pilot himself, played by Miles Teller. There’s a man-candy beach sequence and breathtaking flight sequences that actually top those from the original. Maverick is no less than 1000X better than the original Top Gun, so good it makes the original even better on rewatch.

They’ve flipped the romance a bit, with Jennifer Connelly playing Cruise’s reluctant girlfriend. She is the one who walks away from him, rather than Cruise walking away from Kelly McGillis in the original. Because the original was released the 1980s during Reagan’s second term, there is definitely a “pro-America” vibe. Top Gun topped the box office back then, which was the same year David Lynch’s Blue Velvet came out.

Top Gun was nominated for four Oscars: both sound categories, editing, and song — which it won. The Best Picture nominees that year were:

Platoon
Children of a Lesser God
The Mission
A Room With a View
Hannah and Her Sisters

That tells you a lot about who the Academy was back then, what their sensibilities were, and why Top Gun could never have landed a Best Picture nomination. But here were the five box office champs the year Top Gun topped it — you can see that the Best Picture winner from the previous year Out of Africa was doing quite well at the box office because there wasn’t the same disconnect as there is now:

Due to release dates, Platoon, Hannah, and the rest of them weren’t major box office players that year, but by the following year, Platoon came in at number two for the whole year:

The point is that the Oscars were relevant with the public. People watched the movies and the movies that were nominated were watched. There wasn’t such a major disconnect that most people couldn’t even tell you what was nominated or what won in a given year. The past two years have nearly killed the Oscars entirely. They could do a lot worse than actively voting to make sure Top Gun: Maverick gets in.

Nowadays, a film eventually needs (according to Marshall Flores) roughly 863 votes to secure a spot in a Best Picture lineup. First round, second round — doesn’t matter. It surely helps to have many number one votes heading in. If you don’t have any number ones you aren’t going to even get a look in the first place. If you come in with a low number of number ones, you’re probably going to be among the first to be eliminated.

Drive My Car likely got a healthy number of number ones heading in and then made up for the rest of it with higher placed down-ballot votes. Spider-Man, by contrast, probably didn’t have enough number one votes to begin with, and certainly wasn’t going to be placed in the 1-5 position on the majority of the ballots. It might have been 9 or 10 for a lot of them but that isn’t enough. It has to be a film that hits much higher on all ballots.

Maverick is going to need to be considered, at least, for directing (Joseph Kosinski) and screenplay (Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer and Christopher McQuarrie). It should have no problem landing the tech nods, as the original did. And it could win Best Song for Lady Gaga, who knows. Can Tom Cruise land in the Best Actor race? Well, probably not — but again, it just depends on how the year goes. They just have to catch the fire, like Brad Pitt did with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

Much has been made of this movie not being “woke” and that being the reason it did well. In its own way, it is “woke,” I thought, by putting Monica Barbaro in one of the primary pilot positions. I actually don’t think they would have sent a woman in to that kind of crucial mission. I’m not saying women couldn’t do it, but I am saying when it’s a life or death situation they’re probably not going to go that way. But the film isn’t a documentary either, so it doesn’t get in the way.

Where Hollywood goes wrong is in trying to replace the traditional male hero with a female. If they do that with the Jack Sparrow character in Pirates of the Caribbean, if they make another Pirates movie, it will likely bomb. People want to see Johnny Depp in that role and if they don’t cast him, they might as well not make it. Ditto Top Gun. If they’d remade it with a female in the Tom Cruise spot no one would have paid to see that. When people say it isn’t “woke,” I guess that’s what they mean.

There are just some tropes you should not mess with if the intent is to bring in audiences. It’s exhausting trying to fix all of the problems of the world when people just want to go and watch a movie and blow off some much-needed steam. The traditional male hero is something we all fundamentally need and can’t be gotten rid of no matter how much deconstructionist activism is at play. Most people don’t want to see it. Find a better way.

It also doesn’t give any agonizing lectures anywhere on any social justice issue — thank God for that. The last thing people need right now are the richest among us lecturing them on how to “do better.” If Hollywood learns any lesson from this moment in our collective history it is simply this: make better movies. It’s like that great scene at the end of Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories, “If you want to do mankind a real service, tell funnier jokes.”

Top Gun: Maverick knows exactly why people are paying their hard-earned cash to see this film, and it doesn’t waste a second of their time. It simply delivers on every level. I can’t wait to see it again.