The Oscars' Biggest Win? Acknowledging the Power of Genre Movies.
Of all the faces that smiled from the screen during the 90th Academy Awards’ “In Memoriam” segment on Sunday night, the one that made me sigh the loudest was that of George Romero. The director of such horror classics as Night of the Living Dead died last summer at the age of 77, but I wish he could have stuck around long enough to see the Oscars confirm what Romero knew for decades: If you want to dig deep into viewers’ brains, you’re best off doing it through genre.
Consider two of Sunday night’s biggest winners: Jordan Peele’s Get Out—a meticulously constructed sci-fi-horror-comedy hybrid– was awarded Best Original Screenplay, while Guillermo del Toro’s creature-feature fantasia The Shape of Water earned 4 statues, including Best Director and Best Picture. Both filmmakers are major Dead-heads, and like Romero, they found allegorical power in the kinds of movies that many moviegoers (and Academy voters) once refused to take seriously. Get Out employed the innate shocks and tension-easing humor of horror to expose the depths of 21st century racism; The Shape of Water, meanwhile, used the monster-movie format to tell a multi-tiered, multi-species romance that espouses a love for love itself, no matter what form it takes.
Because both movies have been part of the ambient awards conversation for so long now, it’s important to point out: These wins are not normal. The Oscars almost never give the keys to genre filmmakers, especially in the writing, directing, or Best Picture fields. There are exceptions, of course, including The Silence of the Lambs’ sweep in 1991, and Peter Jackson’s trophy-trifecta for The Lord of Rings: The Return of the King in 2003. But for much of the past ninety years, horror, fantasy, and sci-fi films have been confined to the Oscars’ technical departments, while occasionally earning an acting trophy (let’s pause to hail Kathy Bates in Misery, and not just because she’ll sledgehammer our ankles if we don’t). Jaws, The Exorcist, Star Wars: A New Hope, E.T., The Sixth Sense, Avatar, District 9, Black Swan, Inception, Mad Max: Fury Road—all earned Best Picture and/or screenplay nominations, yet no such wins.
But even in a movie year rich with great films– at one point, Lady Bird, Call Me By Your Name, and Phantom Thread were all playing in the same weekend—both Get Out and The Shape of Water proved impossible to ignore. As Peele noted out in his acceptance speech, he’d worked on about 20 drafts of Get Out, the story of a young African-American photographer who realizes his white girlfriend and her family are planning to literally take control of his body. The movie’s arrival last February couldn’t have been more perfectly timed: Released just a few months into the Trump administration—and not long before the white-supremacist marches in Charlottesville—Get Out laid bare the systemic, hereditary racism that many white Americans choose to ignore (or claim to never see at all). The genius of Get Out is that it feels like it was made five minutes ago; its biggest scare lies in the fear that its relevance might never wear away.
The Shape of Water takes a slightly more deft approach: It’s a fairy tale about a mute government worker who falls for an egg-chomping sea creature, their unlikely (and unlawful) union threatened by those who don’t understand their connection. “It’s not even human,” one character notes after learning the creature is in peril. To which our heroine replies: “If we do nothing, neither are we.” It's a call to action that, in the film, is remarkably specific—but in 2018, feels a much-needed, highly egalitarian call to empathy. In the last few weeks before the Oscars, there were more than a few digs at The Shape of Water’s squareness, especially as it solidified its front-runner status. But be clear: This is a Best Picture winner in which a mute woman has sex with a sea-beast, Michael Shannon gets his finger bitten off, and an adorable cat gets gorily devoured. It may not be del Toro’s most satisfyingly gnarly or tripped-out work, but it ain’t The King’s Speech, either.
That these films’ messages were conveyed without mawkishness or dull self-aggrandizement are due, in part, to the genres to which they were confined. When Romero released 1968’s Night of the Living Dead—about a black man who leads a battle against hordes of zombies, only to be murdered by a posse of white gunmen—audiences didn’t realize they were watching a film that reflected the tense state of race in America (and in fact, Romero might not have even realized he was making one). But horror audiences are willing to follow filmmakers anywhere, as long as the body count remains high, giving directors like Romero the leeway to sneak in bigger ideas—even if they sometimes got buried under all the blood.
Peele and del Toro work in that same tradition. And the fact that both Get Out and The Shape of Water enraptured not just mainstream audiences, but also awards voters, is further proof that genre films, have become, in 2018, the ideal medium for examining the genuinely terrifying world around us. I wish Romero could have lived long enough to see Peele and del Toro carry on his legacy straight to the Oscar stage. But I think he’d get a kick out of seeing the
stigma against genre movies get out for good.
Oscars Overdrive
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