M arvel’s Black Panther has been a success on almost every level you can think of: the critics adore it, the world has embraced it, and it’s proven itself as a box office behemoth. Back in 2018, it raked in over $1.3bn globally and earned $700m at the domestic box office – making it the third-highest grossing film of all time in the US. It also earned an impressive £54.3m in the UK. There’s only one victory that so far eludes it: the Academy Award for Best Picture. Are those dreams so far-fetched?

In short, yes. It would be bold to predict that Black Panther would scoop the top prize at this month’s ceremony. The odds are against it: Ryan Coogler missed out on a Best Director nomination, while none of the film’s cast are recognised in the acting nominations. These are usually key steps on the path to Oscar greatness. While the film is nominated for seven awards, most of these are in the technical categories, such as Best Costume Design and Best Sound Editing, which tend to have fairly minimal influence on the eventual Best Picture winner.

Nor has it picked up any wins from the other voting bodies that prove crucial in influencing the Oscars, including Best Director at the Directors Guild Awards (won by Alfonso Cuarón for Roma) and Best Film at the Producers Guild Awards (won by Green Book), with one interesting exception: it won Best Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture at the Screen Actors Guild Awards.

In fact, the unusual spread of winners, with no clear frontrunner at this year’s awards race, suggests one potential outcome: a major surprise when it comes to the ultimate prize. Maybe it’s not so far-fetched to suggest that the surprise could come in the form of Black Panther.

The Greatest Oscar Injustices Ever Show all 10 1 /10 The Greatest Oscar Injustices Ever The Greatest Oscar Injustices Ever How Green Was My Valley Beat: Citizen Kane to Best Picture, Best Director and Best Cinematography, 1941 It takes a bit of searching these days to find someone who has a) seen John Ford’s Welsh melodrama How Green Was My Valley and b) did not do so out of a morbid curiosity to understand what it had that made it better than Citizen Kane. Still, there are loyal fans in Wales where it is set, willing to overlook the somewhat shaky accents in recognition of its portrayal of the hard lives of coal miners and its generally affecting love stories. But this film didn’t have anything close to the seismic effect of Orson Welles’s masterpiece on generations of filmmakers that followed, and in retrospect is a bizarrely safe, sentimental choice. Getty Images The Greatest Oscar Injustices Ever Oliver! Beat: 2001: A Space Odyssey to Best Director and Best Art Direction in 1968 Credit where it’s due: Carol Reed’s take on the musical version of Oliver Twist is a largely peppy affair that isn’t afraid to dip into darkness where necessary to give Fagin and Bill Sikes their edge. But Stanley Kubrick’s film was – as must have been obvious even at the time – a towering achievement, depicting several million years of evolution. The good news is that Kubrick won an Academy Award for his special effects work on the film, his only competitive Oscar, but he was robbed of Best Director and his film of Best Art Direction. Getty Images The Greatest Oscar Injustices Ever March of the Penguins Beat: Enron: The Smartest Guys In the Room to Best Documentary in 2005 If more people watched Enron and fewer people watched fairy tales about penguins, the world would be a better place. Luc Jacquet’s Antarctic nature documentary features some stunning photography amid hostile conditions, but it is handicapped by a trashy, unscientific voice-over that keeps emphasising the family “love” that drives these birds – despite the fact that they only mate for a season and never see their young again, once they’re weaned. Alex Gibney’s look at the shocking crash of a Wall Street darling, on the other hand, manages to make dry financial matters feel vital and immediate, and avoids making cutesy claims that the Enron board just couldn’t help being motivated by a near-mystical devotion to money. Rex Features The Greatest Oscar Injustices Ever Crash Beat: Brokeback Mountain in 2005 Even Crash director Paul Haggis doesn’t think his film should have beaten Ang Lee’s delicate, tragic cowboy romance. And yet the Academy went for the fragmentary ensemble piece rather than the heartbreaker. Maybe they weren’t ready for a film about a gay couple; maybe the voters thought it was more “important” in some way to reward a film about race issues in LA (something close to their everyday experience that may have felt more immediate, perhaps). But whenever people gather together to moan about bad Oscar choices, this will be mentioned within the first five minutes. Rex Features The Greatest Oscar Injustices Ever Driving Miss Daisy Beat: Born On the Fourth of July, Field of Dreams, Dead Poets Society and the not-even-nominated Do the Right Thing to Best Picture in 1989 If you turned on TV one Sunday afternoon and found Driving Miss Daisy, you might think it was a cute, minor picture with some odd, awkward things to say about racism. If someone told you it's a Best Picture winner, you would rightly scoff. And yet it is, beating four films that have all aged considerably better than the winner. Worst of all was the failure of the Academy to even nominate Spike Lee’s blistering Do the Right Thing, which had to make do with a Best Original Screenplay nod and a nomination for Danny Aiello in the Supporting Actor category. Lee would not be nominated for Best Director or Picture until last year’s BlacKkKlansman. Rex The Greatest Oscar Injustices Ever The Greatest Show on Earth Beat: High Noon, The Quiet Man and the not-even-nominated Singin’ In the Rain to Best Picture in 1952 Another embarrassing choice: the Academy rewarded Cecil B De Mille’s circus extravaganza over Fred Zinnemann’s classic Western, High Noon, and John Ford’s Irish favourite The Quiet Man. Worse, they didn’t even nominate Singin’ in the Rain for the top prizes, presumably because it wore its excellence too lightly. The award for Greatest Show tends to be explained away as a sort of career prize for De Mille, but the irony is that he would go on to make The Ten Commandments just a few years later in 1956, which would in turn have made a much better Best Picture winner than Around the World in 80 Days, which beat it that year. But then the winner that year should have been The Searchers, so perhaps that doesn’t solve much. Getty Images The Greatest Oscar Injustices Ever Roberto Begnini for Life Is Beautiful Beat: Edward Norton for American History X, Tom Hanks for Saving Private Ryan to Best Actor in 1998 As a film, Life Is Beautiful gets a lot of abuse, but it might have escaped unnoticed if its comic leading man had not won Best Actor at the Oscars and clambered over several rows of the most expensive audience in the world to collect his prize. It’s not a terrible performance, but it’s not even the best Second World War-set performance that year – see Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan, and tip your hat to The Thin Red Line along the way. The winner, however, should probably have been Edward Norton on terrifying, terrific form in American History X. Rex Features The Greatest Oscar Injustices Ever Peter Pau for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Beat: Roger Deakins for O Brother, Where Are Thou? to Best Cinematography in 2000 This is not to say that Peter Pau didn’t do beautiful things with Ang Lee’s wuxia epic. But Roger Deakins did pioneering work on the Coens’ O Brother, transferring the whole film to a “digital intermediate” to process and change the colours of the movie to give it a sepia tone. His process became a new Hollywood standard and led to two decades of highly stylised, carefully coloured digital films. In retrospect, his was the greater innovation – and an award in 2000 would have saved the Academy nearly two embarrassing decades of not having given Roger Deakins a cinematography Oscar. Rex Features The Greatest Oscar Injustices Ever Helen Hunt for As Good As It Gets Beat: Judi Dench for Mrs Brown and Kate Winslet for Titanic to Best Actress in 1997 Helen Hunt is charming opposite Jack Nicholson in this comedy drama, but even at the time viewers would have struggled to remember her character’s name (it was Carol, for the record). If the win was for supporting actress, the role might have passed muster, but as a lead it has far too little substance to stand against the likes of Judi Dench’s Queen Victoria or even Kate Winslet’s blockbuster action heroine Rose. Through no fault of Hunt’s own, it’s symbolic of the rubbish female roles that abounded – even at the Oscars – at this time. Rex Features The Greatest Oscar Injustices Ever Amy Adams Hasn’t beaten: Anyone yet, despite six nominations It only took five nominations for Leonardo DiCaprio to go from bright young thing to “it’s his time”. Well, Amy Adams has had six nominations across Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress, and she should have been nominated for Arrival as well in 2016, so we need to start an “it’s her time” narrative. She was nominated for Vice last year, but lost out, as predicted, to Regina King, whose performance in If Beale Street Could Talk was heartbreaking. It wasn't quite Adams's time yet. Getty Images for Turner

The film has already beaten the odds. It made history when it became the first superhero film ever to land a nomination for Best Picture at the Oscars, making it the third-highest grossing nominee ever in the category, behind James Cameron’s Avatar and Titanic. Whatever the eventual outcome, it still stands as a pivotal moment in the history of the Academy Awards, and the voters’ attitudes towards superhero movies.

Change has been brewing for a while. It was the failure, after all, to nominate Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight for Best Picture in 2009 that sparked enough outrage to convince the academy to expand the list of films that could be nominated in the category from five to a possible 10.

The change, in reality, didn’t produce any immediate effect. The real watershed moment came last year, when James Mangold’s Logan, focusing on an older version of the X-Men’s Wolverine, became the first superhero film to be nominated in the screenplay categories. Fast-forward to Black Panther’s nomination and there’s a clear progression to be found in the academy’s mindset when it comes to superhero films.

This could be down to its changing demographics. Four years ago saw the #OscarsSoWhite campaign, partially following the damning survey the previous year that revealed 94 per cent of Oscar voters were white and 77 per cent were men, while the average age was 63. In response, the academy made a move in 2016 to invite 683 new members, of which 41 per cent were people of colour and 46 per cent were women. In 2017, the academy added a record-breaking 774 new members from 57 different countries, of which 30 per cent were people of colour and 39 per cent were women.

The move has allowed the previously improbable to become a reality – both 2017’s Best Picture winner, Moonlight, and last year’s winner, The Shape of Water, weren’t the traditional frontrunners but nonetheless took home the prize.

In all fairness, the lack of Best Picture winners within the comic book genre isn’t entirely down to snobbery among voters: these films are also playing very different games. How exactly does one judge fairly the quality of any blockbuster-style film against the usual Oscar fare when their priorities are so different? Cuarón never had to worry about which of Roma’s characters had the best merchandising potential (the answer, obviously, would be the dog who keeps defecating in the driveway). Yorgos Lanthimos wasn’t distracted by making sure Queen Anne’s battle armour in The Favourite was canon enough to satisfy the hardcore fans.

Lupita Nyong'o, Chadwick Boseman and Letitia Wright in Black Panther (Marvel Studios)

The blockbuster is an enterprise that, in reality, must provide more than gripping storytelling and human emotion, as key as those elements still are to its success. This also crops up when discussing the academy’s historical aversion to horror, a genre that must always balance its human drama with a feast of good scares. And, while fantasy and sci-fi films have sometimes had better luck at the Oscars, with the likes of The Lord of the Rings and Avatar picking up Best Picture, the superhero film is further burdened by its need to pay dues to the greater cinematic universe it exists in.

It could be argued, even, that the Oscars are hesitant to reward the likes of Marvel and DC with any more power in Hollywood, considering how dominant they’ve become in the popular culture – often to the detriment of more original, mid-budget filmmaking.

However, Black Panther manages to avoid break free of these constraints. Although it bears all the usual markings of a Marvel product (there are references to previous films and a climactic battle filled with CGI trickery), Coogler’s achievement as a director is to use a familiar framework to tell a radical story within mainstream filmmaking: utilising the strife between T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman), the ruler of Wakanda, and Killmonger (Michael B Jordan) to illustrate a nuanced, layered commentary on colonialism and black identity.

Oscars 2019: Nominations for Best Picture

As Mikey Mason of Geeks of Color wrote: “The film is a lightning rod of representation, in a time where black people feel so belittled and not paid attention to. Despite all that, director Ryan Coogler and his class-A cast have rallied together to create a film that is every bit as moving, political, and combative as the party it shares its title with.” Indeed, the film even subverts the usual hero/villain dynamic, by deliberately giving Killmonger a motivation that is both sympathetic and grounded in a cultural reality.

This kind of thematic complexity is still rare in the realm of blockbusters – and that’s before even acknowledging the profound cultural impact of the film. Its declaration of “Wakanda Forever!” has become a wider symbol of black excellence, used by tennis players Gael Monfils and Sachia Vickery, rapper Cardi B, and senator Kamala Harris.