Avengers without Academy Awards
Many people know that Avengers: Endgame has broken many various records in the movie industry and especially the box office. Starting with an insane opening weekend, Avengers: Endgame went on to become the highest-grossing movie of all time, beating out Avatar which held the record since its release in 2009. However, the film's most recent record was less positive - it is the first highest-grossing movie to not receive a nomination from the Academy Awards for Best Picture.
In fact, despite all of the various records that Marvel has accomplished since the release of Iron Man in 2008, the only film in the franchise to win an Academy Award is 2018's Black Panther. At the 91st Academy Awards, Black Panther won Best Original Score, Best Production Design, and Best Costume Design and was nominated for Best Original Song, Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing, and Best Picture. Some veterans in the film industry look down upon these movies compared to other films. Namely, Martin Scorsese referred to the movies with the Marvel Cinematic Universe as "not cinema," and compared them to theme parks rather than true works of art. I, on the other hand, would like to portray the fact that Marvel's long-running franchise, specifically the movie Avengers: Endgame, deserves more praise than it receives at the Academy Awards.
2/13/20 Journal - This preview of my visual argument... certainly looks different than everyone else's. Because I did the base of my collage using code, and I just got that finished, I haven't really gotten to dig into GIMP yet. So, rather than my GIMP project file, I have my code. Again, very different from everyone else's. I have, though, used GIMP to add color to the icons used for the collage, but the actual collage was built entirely randomly using Processing.
I don't believe I have much more to do past this stage. I want to add the text "2020" with a large sans-serif font to the screen, perhaps just negating all color in that space. This may not show up well with the collage beneath, but it's certainly something I'd like to try. In addition, I am considering adding some features to the Academy Award statue to make more clear what it is meant to be. I would like to add a few more characters in the future, especially Spider-Man comes to mind.
I think as it is, the argument for the MCU to perform well at the Academy Awards is present, though could be strengthened. I think the "2020" text will help to make the argument for Avengers: Endgame at the 2020 Oscars more specific. I hope the silhouette of the statue is enough for the viewer to recognize what it is meant to be. Those not familiar with the Academy Awards will likely be unfamiliar, though this argument then doesn't entirely apply to them.
One feature I certainly need to implement is the ability to save and load a collage from some sort of text file, so that it can be edited if necessary. I could play with the transparency of the images without needing to recalculate the entire collage, which would be ideal. Saving into a text file wouldn't be too entirely difficult, I just need to provide the image name, position, scale, and tint. Rather than having a universal alpha value for all images in the collage, each one could get an individual opacity. This could have the potential to add character to the collage, or it could make it look far more cluttered than it already is. Solid images could be the way to go, but that is certainly something I can play around with in the future.