When I heard the nominations for the 2026 Academy Awards being announced earlier this year, one main thought occurred to me. Wow, this has been a very good year for horror movies. A bloody vampire film leads the field with sixteen nominations. A new version of “Frankenstein” scored 9 nods, including for Best Picture. The most memorable horror villain of the past year is now a Best Supporting Actress nominee. A really gross Norwegian flick sneaked into the Best Makeup category. Hell, with this perspective in mind, a movie as weird, twisted, and violent as “Bugonia” arguable classifies as well. Everyone says the Academy doesn't like horror and it's a point of continued irritation for a big monster fan like myself. Is this changing?
That prompts another question: Has it ever been true? Historically speaking, has the Academy regularly shown a bias against the genre? Well, what do you define as a horror movie? Is “Gaslight” a horror movie? Would you categorize science fiction films with strong degrees of peril, such as “Jurassic Park” or “Terminator 2,” as intending to horrify the audience and not merely thrill them? When there's significant bodily mutation in a motion picture, such as “RoboCop” or “Men in Black,” you would expect people to be horrified by that. What do you do with films about the making of horror films, such as “Gods and Monsters” or “Ed Wood?” Do those count? What about comedies with gruesome monsters or grisly ghost in them, your “Ghostbusters” and “Beetlejuices?” Does Anton Chigurh being an unstoppable, seemingly mythic killer push the Best Picture winner into the disreputable classification of horror?
That prompts another question: Has it ever been true? Historically speaking, has the Academy regularly shown a bias against the genre? Well, what do you define as a horror movie? Is “Gaslight” a horror movie? Would you categorize science fiction films with strong degrees of peril, such as “Jurassic Park” or “Terminator 2,” as intending to horrify the audience and not merely thrill them? When there's significant bodily mutation in a motion picture, such as “RoboCop” or “Men in Black,” you would expect people to be horrified by that. What do you do with films about the making of horror films, such as “Gods and Monsters” or “Ed Wood?” Do those count? What about comedies with gruesome monsters or grisly ghost in them, your “Ghostbusters” and “Beetlejuices?” Does Anton Chigurh being an unstoppable, seemingly mythic killer push the Best Picture winner into the disreputable classification of horror?
Usually according to the critics and press agents that write about the Oscars, none of them count. They are “psychological thrillers.” A film where Anthony Hopkins eats a guy's face transcends the icky label that defines near-pornographic trash like “Friday the 13th,” naturally. A giant shark eating people or a humanoid fish creature with claws and fangs are enough to classify some pictures as horror but not, if you listen to some folks, “Jaws” or “The Shape of Water.” That's been the old line for years and years. I had hoped, such a promising Fangoria-friendly nomination slate, would show that these attitudes have changed. But I've already seen one prominent publication referring to “Sinners” as a “supernatural thriller,” so I guess not.
Nevertheless, despite the tendency of Academy voters to not want to acknowledge even the horror films they like as being such, facts don't lie. Let us look at the brass tacks numbers to determine whether it is true that the Academy doesn't like horror movies. Across the entire history of the Academy Awards, roughly 5240 movies that have been nominated. Pulling from that list, I managed to dig up about 165 or so nominees that fall within the boundaries of the horror genre or are, at least, horror adjacent. The first of which was 1931's “Svengali,” nominated for its cinematography and art direction. All together, 165 out of 5240 adds up to 3.13%. Compared that to the most respectable of genres, the drama, which ranks at 51.09%. 2677 or so movies. The comedy, also said to be rarely recognized by the Academy, makes up 25.21 percent of the entire body of nominations.
Nevertheless, despite the tendency of Academy voters to not want to acknowledge even the horror films they like as being such, facts don't lie. Let us look at the brass tacks numbers to determine whether it is true that the Academy doesn't like horror movies. Across the entire history of the Academy Awards, roughly 5240 movies that have been nominated. Pulling from that list, I managed to dig up about 165 or so nominees that fall within the boundaries of the horror genre or are, at least, horror adjacent. The first of which was 1931's “Svengali,” nominated for its cinematography and art direction. All together, 165 out of 5240 adds up to 3.13%. Compared that to the most respectable of genres, the drama, which ranks at 51.09%. 2677 or so movies. The comedy, also said to be rarely recognized by the Academy, makes up 25.21 percent of the entire body of nominations.
Of the genres of motion picture recognized by the Letterboxd algorithm, only two rank lower in representation among the Academy: At the bottom is the TV movie, with 0.26%. Yes, despite made-for-television programming traditionally residing outside the AMPAS' area of consideration, about 14 of them have still received nominations. The next least represented genre by percentage truly surprised me: At 2.67% (a measly 140 titles) is the western. You're telling me the most populist style of filmmaking for the first fifty or so decades of filmmaking has gotten fewer overall Oscar nominations than the disreputable movies with the zombies and hacked-up teenagers in them? One can presumably attribute this to westerns being made a lot less frequently in the modern age than they once more.
If you do a little more math, the real difference makes itself apparent. Out of the 140 westerns to be nominated for an Oscar, 71 have won an award. Compare that to the horror genre's slate of nominees, even when casting a wide net as I have done, of 164 nominees producing only 46 winners. The most obvious disparity of all is this: Four Westerns have won best picture, assuming you count “No Country for Old Men” as a western. (The others are 1931's “Cimarron,” “Dances with Wolves,” and “Unforgiven.) While the only horror movie to ever achieve that honor is “The Silence of the Lambs.” Which, famously, was seemingly re-categorized as a “thriller” the minute it became one of the year's best reviewed movies.
Yes, the question of why horror flicks get less recognition while the western gets more, despite having similar sample sizes, is one of respectability. The western is Americana, rooted in our country's collective mythology and testament to the ideas the nation was built on. Horror is about uglier emotions, of fear and disgust and dread. Not so glamorous, ya know? Once you start looking at the facts through this lens, the Academy's occasional acknowledgment of genre cinema can't help but seem begrudging. After all, the first time a horror movie won an Oscar was in 1932, when Fredric March won Best Actor for “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde...” An award he had to share with Wallace Beery in “The Champ,” an actor of such limited range that it would later become a joke in “Barton Fink.” I know that's surely only a coincidence but... Dang, sticks in your teeth, ya know?
I suppose this is an inevitable sign of how we nerdy nerds into fantastical stories are ultimately insecure about our love for this kind of storytelling. Who gives a shit if horror movies don't win Oscars? Why would a Monster-Mania convention goer spare a minute's thought on the pretentious business of industry award show hypocrisy? But we want our bullshit to be taken as seriously as everyone else's bullshit! It's a contradiction I have no good answer for. Everyone knows the Oscars don't actually matter. Horror will still be a beloved and obsessed over style of storytelling fifty years from now, when “CODA” and “Green Book” have become otherwise forgotten.
I suppose this is an inevitable sign of how we nerdy nerds into fantastical stories are ultimately insecure about our love for this kind of storytelling. Who gives a shit if horror movies don't win Oscars? Why would a Monster-Mania convention goer spare a minute's thought on the pretentious business of industry award show hypocrisy? But we want our bullshit to be taken as seriously as everyone else's bullshit! It's a contradiction I have no good answer for. Everyone knows the Oscars don't actually matter. Horror will still be a beloved and obsessed over style of storytelling fifty years from now, when “CODA” and “Green Book” have become otherwise forgotten.
I don't think the high chance of “Sinners” winning Best Picture this year represents any actual shift in the Academy's tastes, not any more than “Get Out” winning Best Original Screenplay nine years ago or “The Substance” cracking the top categories last year. The truth is that American taste-makers and the industry they surround themselves with have this difficult to dismiss fixation on realism. Anything that veers away from that commitment to reality and into the dream-like or otherworldly is more likely to be dismissed. Even within the medium of film, an inherently dream-like and otherworldly experience. Nevertheless, I'll continue to be irked by it and complain about it at length, because this is what I've chosen to do with my life.
No comments:
Post a Comment