Nominated for Nothing: Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation

Which movie was better: Mean Streets or The Sting? There’s no wrong answer, but here’s something that’s criminal: The Sting, George Roy Hill’s reunion with Paul Newman and Robert Redford, won seven Academy Awards, including the Oscar for Best Picture. (That’s not the criminal part…) Mean Streets, Martin Scorsese’s gritty crime pic with Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel, on the other hand, won zero Oscars. It didn’t win any Oscars because it wasn’t even nominated for a single award. Not one…

So you can debate whether The Sting was the best movie of 1973. But you can’t excuse the Academy for completely ignoring Mean Streets. Just about every year, brilliant movies like Mean Streets are completely ignored by the Oscars. The Academy has a long history of overlooking comedies, action movies, horror flicks, hard-boiled genre pics, and artsy foreign films — films like The Searchers, Groundhog Day, Touch of Evil, and The Big Lebowski.

History, fortunately, is the ultimate arbiter of greatness. Before this year’s ceremony, we’re taking a closer look at 2015 films that were too small, too weird, or perhaps simply too awesome for the Academy Awards. These are the Non-Nominees.

The film: Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation, the fifth film derived from the classic Cold War spy series, once again starring Tom Cruise as himself daredevil super-agent Ethan Hunt. This time, Hunt’s on the run through Vienna, Morocco, and London, facing off against an omniscient nemesis organization called The Syndicate. And he’s met his match in the Ilsa Faust, a femme mysterieuse who might be a femme fatale, played by franchise newcomer Rebecca Ferguson.

Why it wasn’t nominated: This is where someone would usually write “the Academy doesn’t nominate action movies,” if this wasn’t the year of Mad Max: Fury Road. But when it comes to the Oscars, the exceptions always prove the rule. The Academy loves a rousing action film, but only if it comes flavored with real-world resonance (like The Hurt Locker) or historical significance (like Django Unchained) or some sort of Deep Thought thematic overlay (like the apartheid-flavored District 9.) If all else fails, the Academy will find room for an action movie that combines massive grosses with a high degree of difficulty — like the Lord of the Rings movies, or Avatar.

Rogue Nation is none of those things. Director and co-writer Christopher McQuarrie works with the eternally game-for-anything Cruise to turn Hunt into a gloriously human cartoon character, jumping and running and driving and falling from one madcap stunt-performed setpiece into another one. The film starts with Cruise jumping onto the wing of an ascending plane — a wild opening that throws the phrase “real-world resonance” right out of the window. Rogue Nation has less in common with Zero Dark Thirty than Looney Tunes, and Looney Tunes hasn’t won an Oscar since the Eisenhower administration.

Why history will remember it better than the Academy did: You could argue that Rogue Nation is “merely” an example of a franchise picture done exactly right. McQuarrie brings back some key ingredients from earlier films in the series — and promotes affable Simon Pegg from “computer guy” comic relief to full-fledged buddy-movie sidekick — while also shedding unnecessary plot elements. (Farewell, Any Mention At All Of Michelle Monaghan!) And with the addition of Ilsa, McQuarrie gives Rogue Nation a new wild-card element unique in the series, a semi-antagonist with her own complete character arc running parallel to Hunt’s. (Ferguson has a busy schedule ahead, with roles opposite Meryl Streep and Michael Fassbender and a lead role in the buzzy literary adaptation The Girl on the Train.)

But I think just calling out Rogue Nation as a solid entry in a very good franchise underscores McQuarrie’s achievement. Mission: Impossible as a concept depends on double-triple crosses as a standard-operating procedure, and you could argue that Rogue Nation itself is an act of cinematic espionage. Within the guise of a modern megablockbuster, McQuarrie keeps on finding ways to produce an old-fashioned throwback thriller. The plane scene wowed audiences who saw the trailer, but the real showcase scene in Rogue Nation is the brilliant Vienna Opera House scene, an attemped assassination crossuctting between several different planes of action. It’s legitimately Hitchcockian in the best sense: Quietly enthralling, slow building, by turns funny and horrifying.

Big-budget action movies seem to only get more cosmically enormous as we get deeper into the digital era. (The new trailer for Independence Day: Resurgence appears to feature a spaceship the size of a planet!) But in Rogue Nation, the most memorable special effect is Cruise. Did he really hang off a moving airplane? Can he really hold his breath for six minutes? Rogue Nation turns the actor’s workaholic obsessiveness into a running joke — Hunt drives an entire car chase a couple minutes after someone restarts his heart — but it’s also a passionate ode to Cruise in all his Tom Cruiseness. At one point, Alec Baldwin’s CIA Director refers to Ethan Hunt as “the living manifestation of destiny.” The triumph of Rogue Nation is how that line sounds funny and accurate.