10 Oscars The Marvel Cinematic Universe Should Have Won In A Fair World

3. Editing - Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Action movies require good editors - without them, the set-pieces are in danger of getting muddled and uninteresting. Captain America: The Winter Soldier is one of the best MCU movies to date because it plays around with genre so much - it's a superhero movie as well as a conspiracy thriller, a buddy movie and an allegorical sci-fi. But perhaps most winningly, it's a solid action movie, and much of that can be put down to editors Jeffrey Ford and Matthew Schmidt. If Joe and Anthony Russo bring an unforeseen realism to the MCU in The Winter Soldier, Ford and Schmidt are the masterminds behind the film's clean, concise action beats. If recent movies like The Gunman and Child 44 proved anything, it's that action scenes can become totally confusing if the editor doesn't know what they're doing; if The Winter Soldier proves anything, it's that the action can become invigorating with the right people wielding the scissors. Editing action well requires a more precise hand than drama, which so often gets priority in the Best Editing category at the Oscars. In 2015, the year Winter Soldier was eligible, it should at the very least have taken the place in Editing occupied by The Imitation Game, a film which could just as easily have been cut by a chimp.