Guest Author - Andy Boxall

As the 78th Annual Academy Awards draw ever closer and the nominees start to prepare their speeches, genre film fans once more resign themselves to not seeing any of the year’s best efforts rewarded by the most influential awards board of them all. Of course, no one expects the low-budget, gory or exploitative titles to make the list (and rightly so), but when a decent horror film comes along that has the right names attached; we do expect at least a token nod in its direction. But the Academy is not a fan of horror pictures as its history shows, so here we take a look at the films that should have done a little better than they did.

In 1961, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho received four nominations and although it is not really a horror film, it is still a shocking. Of course, it didn’t win any of its categories. Ten year later the genre picture A Clockwork Orange was put up for Best Picture but lost out to the more deserving (and far more accessible) The French Connection. In the same year the horrifying (but not strictly ‘horror’) film Straw Dogs was also overlooked.

In 1974 the Academy had a shock with a strong performance by William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist. The film was nominated for an amazing 10 awards including Best Picture, Best Actor, actress and director. It ended up winning only two awards, for Best Writing and Best Sound. Although it was not suitable material for the best picture win, Ellen Burstyn deserved the leading actress Oscar. She was beaten by Glenda Jackson for A Touch of Class. Although it was refreshing to see The Exorcist recognized, the years other atmospheric horror film, Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, was ignored.

The next horrific film to make an appearance at the Awards was Jaws in 1976. It was up for four Oscars including Best Picture and went home with a respectable three (sound, film editing and score) but missed out on the big one. Over the next decade or so, a few well-received horror films put in appearances, but never troubled the main awards. The Omen and The Fly took the only awards for genre films during this time, winning Best Music and Best Make Up respectively. Nominations but no wins included The Amityville Horror for Best Score, Poltergeist for Best Score (are you seeing the trend here?), Best Sound FX, and Best Visual FX and Ghostbusters for Best Music and Best FX.

More shocking than anything else was the total omission of films like Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Kubrick was traditionally shunned by the Academy so not to see his name was no surprise. But to leave Jack Nicholson off the Actor list and the awesome cinematography out of contention was a crime. Best Music – Original Score went to Fame in case you were wondering.

It was 1992 before the horror film made a comeback not seen since The Exorcist, this time courtesy of Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs. Personally I don’t class it as a horror film per se, but everyone else does, including the Academy, so we shall sing its praises here. A total of seven nominations were turned into five wins: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress and Best Writing. Lambs was extra special in that it was one of only three other movies ever to win the big five awards. Quite something for a film featuring a cannibal!

But that was enough for the Academy and since then it has been a dismal showing on awards night. Of course, this may have something to do with the lack of quality horror movies over the last 10 years, but there were some that should have made the cut, such as The Blair Witch Project and American Psycho. Still, fans can look back on the glory years of 1974 and 1992, when their kind of film took on the traditional, mainstream Oscar friendly movies that dominate the awards every other year. Good times!

Of course, there are various awards for genre pictures where they are judged against their peers, such as The Academy of Science Fiction and Horror Films. Nominations for the May 2nd show include Wolf Creek, Saw 2 and The Skeleton Key in the horror category, plus Batman Begins and Star Wars Episode III over in Science Fiction. Over at the Razzies, House of Wax and its ‘star’ Paris Hilton are expected to do well, or should that be badly?