We had three films release this past weekend with the potential for Oscar nominations.

Thor: The Dark World

It’s the weekend’s number one film and it has all the earmarks of another Marvel blockbuster; however, success at the box office does not an Oscar nominee make. As in the first year Thor appeared, the Academy is still largely doesn’t care for the Marvel universe, giving out a scant four nominations to all of the Avengers-era and X-Men-era films. The Avengers nabbed one nomination in Best Visual Effects, Iron Man and Iron Man 2 likewise earned Best Visual Effects nominations and the original Iron Man (ostensibly the beginning of the Marvel Avengers universe) also picked up a Sound Editing nomination. None of them have won.

What does this mean? Of the three non-nominated entries in the Avengers universe, The Incredible Hulk, Captain America: The First Avenger and Thor, each boasted rich visual effects environments and two had lush production design. Captain America could have picked up mentions in several categories, but all of this just shows that the Academy’s creative branches aren’t that impressed or simply don’t want to give it any more support than they have to. Iron Man 3 and Thor: The Dark World will be the franchise’s only entries this year and while it might be easy to suggest the effects-heavy Thor will be the lone nominee, Iron Man 3 has more cross-discipline effects in it.

Thor: The Dark World, with nothing really new in terms of costume design or production design, has mostly environmental visual effects where whole worlds have been generated. Iron Man 3 largely employs supporting effects, model destruction and more. The only place I think Thor: The Dark World could compete effectively is Best Makeup and Hairstyling. The film doesn’t have a lot of such effects, but the Dark Elves designs, especially their leader, could be interesting enough to make that branch’s short list. Ultimately, the lack of far-ranging makeup effects (if you don’t count Thor’s two Asgardian teammates), will mean this film ends up with zero mentions like its predecessor.

The Armstrong Lie

It’s hard to believe that it’s been six years since Alex Gibney was last nominated for and won an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. On his second nomination after 2005’s Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Gibney won a surprise Oscar for his film Taxi to the Dark Side, exploring the disturbing torture practices employed by the United States in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay.

His win was a wake-up call for political documentarians who’d been struggling to get more dense material recognized at the Oscars for years with many of their victories being documentary-light or documentaries that focused on problems around the world and not in the U.S. Yet, after four prominent documentaries of his were ignored at the Oscars (Casino Jack and the United States of Money, Freakonomics, Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer and Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God), it’s become apparent that his brand of documentary filmmaking winning might have been a fluke. Or has it?

There have been other politically-charged documentaries exploring challenging subjects in the intervening years, but the failure of the critically acclaimed Mea Maxima Culpa to make it to the final nomination list is quite telling. The Armstrong Lie is unlike those other documentaries in that it’s not a political bombshell and is a bit more puff-piece-friendly. Looks can be deceiving. The film, which started out as exploring the rise to fame of Lance Armstrong turned into something completely different as allegations of performance-enhancing drug use emerged and led to Armstrong’s career flame-out, Gibney turned the film into an expose, and has been receiving strong reviews. It’s more accessible than many of his recent efforts and could easily place on the finalist list this year. An Oscar nomination wouldn’t be surprising, but a win is unlikely.

The Book Thief

Mediocre-to-awful reviews pretty much sinks The Book Thief‘s chances at major Oscar consideration, but it’s surprisingly strong performance at the weekend box office may foretell a situation where the film sneaks in to a few categories.

The story, which explores a young girl’s emergence as a reader and collector of books in World War II Germany was an international bestseller. The film’s highlights on book burning, knowledge destruction and despicable treatment of the Jews would sound like the perfect fodder for many Academy voters who’ve embraced all manners of Holocaust films over the decades. It’s those negative reviews that will ultimately doom the film.

The film’s performance with critics reminds me of another bestseller-turned-Oscar-flameout The Kite Runner. Heavily touted for the better part of the year as a major Oscar contender, the film hit a bumpy patch when critics didn’t become instantly enamored with the film. That film debuted on almost ten times as many screens and earned a smaller per screen average than The Book Thief has this weekend, which suggests it could still be a popular film at the box office.

In the end, the film could compete in the weaker Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress categories where Oscar winner Geoffrey Rush and Oscar nominee Emily Watson could make appearances. The film could also pick up a nomination in the only category Kite Runner did (Best Original Score), and might appear in categories like Production Design and Costume Design. Anything more than these would be shocking and ultimately, I think the film will fail to show up anywhere unless it becomes the year’s break-out platform-release hit.