Why didn't Heat win an Oscar? It wasn't nominated for a single one

Michael Mann's Heat opened on December 15, 1995, through Warner Bros. It cost $60 million, made $187.4 million worldwide and got the kind of reviews studios put on posters. Todd McCarthy called it in Variety a "deeply melancholy take on modern life."

When the 68th Academy Award nominations were announced on February 13, 1996, Heat wasn't on the list anywhere. Not picture, director, actor, screenplay, cinematography or editing. The question in the headline has a very short answer, and the more interesting question is how a movie like that misses everything.

Who got in instead

The 1996 Oscars belonged to a very different kind of movie:

• Best Picture: Braveheart won, over Apollo 13, Babe, Il Postino and Sense and Sensibility.
• Best Director: Mel Gibson won, with Chris Noonan, Tim Robbins, Mike Figgis and Michael Radford also nominated.
• Best Actor: Nicolas Cage won for Leaving Las Vegas. Neither Pacino nor De Niro was nominated.
• Best Supporting Actor: Kevin Spacey won for The Usual Suspects, which also won Original Screenplay.

Look at the Best Picture list again. It's a medieval war epic, a NASA rescue, a talking pig, a Jane Austen adaptation and an Italian postman who delivers Pablo Neruda's mail. Il Postino made $10.7 million in the U.S. and still got in. There isn't a contemporary crime movie in sight, let alone a three-hour one about a cop and a thief.

Why it missed

The Academy doesn't publish reasons, but the record from that season points to a few:

• The calendar: Heat opened in mid-December and debuted in third place with $8.4 million. That season Variety wondered whether Oscar voters would be any warmer to it than the Golden Globe voters, who may not even have seen the late-breaking film in time.
• The studio: Warner Bros. ran ads for it, to no effect. The studio's most-nominated movie that Oscar year turned out to be Batman Forever.
• The reviews: They were strong, not unanimous. Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman gave it a B- and called the heist-planning and investigation scenes "dry, talky."

Roger Ebert was on the other side, with three and a half stars.

"With an uncommonly literate screenplay by Mann, handles it with insight."

— Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

What happened next

Mann got his Oscar attention four years later. His next film, The Insider, picked up seven nominations, including Best Picture, and won none. Across his whole career, his films have won exactly one Oscar, for the sound on The Last of the Mohicans.

Heat, meanwhile, aged into the movie people assume did win something.

Heat didn't lose a single Oscar. It never got the chance to.

Now it's getting a sequel, adapted from the 2022 novel Heat 2 that Mann wrote with Meg Gardiner. Warner Bros. dropped the film over a budget that had reached about $200 million, and Amazon MGM picked it up for closer to $170 million. In July, TheWrap reported Leonardo DiCaprio and Christian Bale were lined up to play Chris Shiherlis and Vincent Hanna, with filming set for November, though Amazon said no deals had been finalized.

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Thirty years after the Academy passed on Heat, the studio that released it passed on the sequel. Mann, according to The Playlist, is already plotting Heat 3.

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