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

Dheepan

Director Jacques Audiard’s 22-year career as a director has resulted in one Oscar nomination as Best Foreign Language Film. Could the same happen this year? It’s possible.

In 2008, Audiard directed A Prophet, the story of a young Arab man sent to prison and becomes a mafia kingpin. The film won 47 international awards, collecting many of them from U.S. critics in the Best Foreign Language Film category. This gave him a leg-up in the competition for an Oscar nomination, which he secured. Although it was thought to be the odds-on favorite early in the process, Argentina’s The Secret in Their Eyes triumphed at the Oscars.

His 2012 follow up film Rust and Bone received excellent reviews earning 32 international awards, including two Oscar nominations. It did not earn anything at the Oscars. The story about a young father who bonds with a killer whale trainer after an accident could have been an Oscar contender, but it was not submitted to the Oscars by France. They submitted The Intouchables instead, which was surprisingly not nominated at the Oscars.

This year, Audiard has a new opportunity with his film Dheepan. The film won Palme d’Or at last year’s Cannes Film Festival received nine nominations for the César Awards this year. If the film wins there, it will be in a solid position to be submitted by the French Academy selections committee. The film is about a Sri Lankan refugee who brings a fake family to France where he becomes involved in a dangerous conflict that threatens the safety of his new “family.” The film has solid prospects, a Cannes prize is nothing to shake a stick at. We’ll just have to see how things pan out in the near future.

Captain America: Civil War

There are few franchises to struggle so mightily with Oscar recognition. Even the worst acclaimed like Transformers have managed to nab Oscar nominations. However, until 2014, the only films from the Marvel Cinematic Universe to earn Oscar nominations were films starring Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.). In 2014, the first film to break that logjam was Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which earned a Best Visual Effects nomination.

This year, you have both the last Marvel film to earn an Oscar nomination (The Avengers: Age of Ultron couldn’t manage it) features one of the few regulars of the Oscar Cinematic Unvierse, Iron Man. Will the combination result in another Oscar nomination or has the failure of Age of Ultron given us a sign that the MCU is fading. It’s also possible that Fox’s X-Men: Apocalypse and Marvel’s own Doctor Strange will manage to eclipse it in terms of Oscar recognition.

With more films featuring large scale visual effects in competition, it’s much more difficult for comic book films to gain traction. They’re already struggling to earn respect from Oscar voters as it is, but signs of improvement aren’t very visible. Having seen the film, there isn’t a lot of obvious Visual Effects work, which will certainly hurt it in terms of Oscar consideration. You have no massive Triskelion set piece to offer up to Oscar voters and with the aforementioned two competitors on deck for later this year, I suspect it will end up sitting out Oscar night once again.