It Should Have Been Nominated!: ‘Zodiac’

If you look hard enough, there’s no such thing as a bad movie year. Sometimes the cream may seem to rise a bit higher thanks to better distribution, better box office, or grander in-the-moment cultural resonance, but for movie fans willing to do the work, good movies are always out there to be found. Great movie years, though? Those are a rarer breed, with few seeming rarer in retrospect than 2007.

Like 2019 (shoutouts to that underwhelming summer), there were stretches of 2007 at the movies that seemed bleak. It was a summer filled with bloated threequels (Spider-Man 3, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, and Shrek the Third all dropped within a short span of time) and tired blockbuster fodder. While there were some surprise hits throughout, including the now-classic comedy Superbad, it took getting to Oscar season for the year to really get underway. It’s an astonishing lineup of movies that ended up going down as some of the best the aughts had to offer at large.

Looking at the lineup of films nominated for Oscars that year, it’s hard to imagine any of the categories “getting it wrong.” No Country for Old Men. There Will Be Blood. Michael Clayton. The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford. Juno. Eastern Promises. Gone Baby Gone. American Gangster. Once. Ratatouille. 3:10 to Yuma. The list goes on. ‘07 provided such an abundance of great cinema that even an awards body as reliably wonky as the Academy would have had to actively try to screw things up. For the most part, they didn’t (albeit The Golden Compass over Transformers for Best Visual Effects remains a bit screwy). Except for one particularly egregious omission: Zodiac.

It’s a testament to the depth of director David Fincher’s filmography that you could call at least three or four of his movies his masterpiece (and that’s not even taking his stellar work on the Netflix series Mindhunter into consideration). The Social Network remains a generational masterpiece – we even called it one of the best films of the last decade in a recent story – and perhaps the most notable Best Picture snub since Brokeback Mountain (even if The King’s Speech winning ultimately paved the long road leading to Tom Hooper’s Cats). Fight Club, for all of its misreadings by Reddit-brained bros, is an unimpeachable tour-de-force. And Se7en remains the blueprint from which most modern thrillers are built.

But then there’s Zodiac, one of the best pictures of 2007 that the Oscars forgot to treat as such.

IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN NOMINATED FOR: Best Picture

Zodiac came out two years before the travesty that was the 2009 Oscars. Honoring the best films of 2008, the voters forgot to nominate what’s gone on to be the single most well-regarded movie of ‘08 for Best Picture: The Dark Knight. Such an omission proved so incendiary to the public that the following year the Academy opened up the Best Picture race to include at least five but possibly up to ten nominees (this year there are nine, for example).

But maybe ‘07 was the year to do it, if only because there were so many movies that warranted that nomination. The films nominated for Best Picture included winner No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, Michael Clayton, Atonement, and Juno. While No Country and Blood are pretty impossible to remove from the pool, there are countless alternative placements for the other three slots. Anything from Eastern Promises to The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford could take those spots.

Still, it’s not just Best Picture Zodiac wasn’t nominated for. The film received a grand total of zero nominations at the 80th Academy Awards. This is a movie that, in 2016, was called the 12th best film of the century by a board of critics polled by the BBC.

Perhaps it comes down to the fact that the film was released so early in the year (March, to be specific, while most Oscar campaigning doesn’t begin until the fall). Maybe voters were bothered by its admittedly lengthy running time of three hours.

Maybe none of this matters. Zodiac is a masterpiece. It’s tense in ways you don’t know a movie can be until you’ve watched it, and it accomplishes this tension without cheap tricks like jump-scares, spurts of violence (save for one – this is a movie about the Zodiac Killer, after all), or music that games your emotions. Zodiac’s tension stems from how deftly it taps into the human condition, into the nature of fear and confusion. It’s also, like The Social Network, about living in the age of the internet, of accessibility to all the information in the world, despite being set in the ‘70s. On top of that, it’s got career-best work by Robert Downey Jr., Mark Ruffalo, and It Should Have Been Nominated! Alum Jake Gyllenhaal.

There’s something bold about structuring such an engrossing mystery around a true-life case that remained unsolved at the time, and perhaps that lends to the film’s mastery of tension as well. The viewer, unlike the characters they’re following, knows that the efforts of the detectives and journalists working to solve this case are futile. The bad guy gets away with this one. In stacking that knowledge against the story, Fincher crafts a bleak, brutal study of nihilism and emptiness – we are not owed answers to our questions, no matter how grave a matter they pertain to.

It’s hard to say what should get cut from the nominee pool in favor of Zodiac. All five films are not only strong but hold up to scrutiny over a decade after their release. It’s either Atonement or Juno on the chopping block and in this case, we’ve gotta go with the former as what gets cut (no disrespect to our A24 Queen Saoirse Ronan, who made her big debut in this flick). Nominate Zodiac in its place – it’s literally the least you can do for one of Fincher’s masterpieces. That said, it’s hard to dispute No Country’s win, and even if you do, There Will Be Blood has a slightly stronger claim to that win than Zodiac.

The Oscars air this Sunday evening. There are already a number of cases to make for films that were snubbed and there will no doubt be a number of winners gotten wrong by the end of the night. Still, that chaos is part of why the Oscars are fun (even if that fun comes with infinite frustration sometimes). For now, It Should Have Been Nominated! comes to a close, though I promise y’all I’ll never be done yelling about films, performances, and craftsmen who were denied Oscar glory as long as I live (catch me on Twitter still screaming that Tom Hardy should have been nominated for Warrior on a weekly basis).

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