Ever since 2009, when the Academy expanded the number of best picture nominees from five to 10 following the failure of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight to register with voters the previous year, the Oscars has been waiting for a breakout genre movie. Now, suddenly, it has two: Guillermo del Toro’s whimsical period-fantasy The Shape of Water, which took best picture, and Jordan Peele’s satirical horror Get Out, which picked up best original screenplay.
You might even argue that Frances McDormand’s tour de force performance as a grieving mother in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri should also count towards the genre movie’s trophy count, so heavily does the Coen brothers alumnus channel that titan of the western John Wayne. And then there is Roger Deakins’ belated honour in the best cinematography category for his outstanding work on the otherwise largely overlooked Blade Runner 2049.
Oscars voters seem to be looking more sympathetically at the work of genre film-makers than at any time since 2004, when Peter Jackson was garlanded with the best-picture prize for the final instalment in his epic Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Return of the King. So should we be preparing for a new era of sci-fi and fantasy awards season success? The short answer is: probably not. Apart from anything else, both The Shape of Water and Get Out bear little resemblance to the kind of genre movies that are regularly finding their way into multiplexes.
Del Toro’s film reminded me of Steven Spielberg’s ET in its evocation of childlike wonder at the infinite possibilities of the universe, its abiding certainty that humans are not the only creatures capable of complex emotions. But Spielberg no longer has time for the optimistic, open-minded science fiction of the 70s and 80s. His next futuristic opus is the virtual reality tale Ready Player One, a pop culture take on the digital wonderland imagined in the Matrix movies, as if Alice had fallen down the rabbit hole and landed in Toys R Us.
Get Out, meanwhile, ploughs a dark, satirical horror/sci-fi furrow that is these days playing out mostly on the small screen, most notably on Charlie Brooker’s ever-improving Black Mirror. It is no wonder that Peele has been snapped up to take charge of a new version of the Twilight Zone, that other iconic example of bravura anthology television – his writing has the incisive playfulness and spiky menace of the great Rod Serling himself. An intelligently written TV show used to be the ultimate Hollywood calling card; these days it seems that a film-maker with a burgeoning career must direct a great movie if they want to get a meeting with Netflix or Amazon.
Get Out was garlanded ahead of several examples of genre film-making that are far more cinematic in traditional terms. We will surely see few more heart-poundingly epic visions of the future than Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049, with its reimagining of sci-fi as an eye-popping dystopian dreamland. Yet it was rewarded only in technical categories, for cinematography and best visual effects.
Another synapse-searing cinematic spectacle, Matt Reeves’ War for the Planet of the Apes, achieved feats of digital sorcery not seen since Avatar, yet had to be content with a single Oscar nomination for best visual effects. The year’s best reviewed comic book flick, James Mangold’s Logan, also got just one nod for best adapted screenplay, losing out to veteran James Ivory’s script for Call Me By Your Name.
Some might argue that if movies such as these, which have been so widely praised, cannot achieve awards season recognition, then the Oscars are not fit for purpose as a celebration of all corners of cinema, arthouse and mainstream. Yet it is easy to see why Reeves’ and Mangold’s slightly more formulaic and allegorically underpowered efforts were overlooked for the more artful and unexpected Get Out and The Shape of Water.
It’s less obvious why cerebral sci-fi movies such as Blade Runner 2049 and (going back a year or two) Alex Garland’s Ex Machina continue to be ignored by voters in the big categories. For the latter pair are surely paramount examples of the cinema of big ideas – in this case the future of the human race.
When, in the far distant future, our robot overlords look back on the movie landscape of the early 21st century, they may wonder why we were quite so obsessed with an outrageously over-the-top body-swap horror movie and a film in which somebody has sex with an imaginary fish creature – when the really big issues were staring us in the face all along.
