Best Picture Watch: Is Nosferatu Too Much Horror for the Oscar Voters?

A second trailer has dropped for the highly anticipated horror film Nosferatu starring Lily Rose Depp and Willem Dafoe, directed by the talented Robert Eggars. The film also stars Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Emma Corrin, Nicholas Hoult and Paul A Maynard.

Nosferatu is popping up here and there in Oscar predictions of late and I think that’s interesting. The question is whether the film will be too much for Oscar voters. Horror, like other genres that aren’t “intimate character dramas” and sweeping epics, have traditionally had a hard time breaking through to the Best Picture race. There was The Exorcist, Get Out, and if you count them, Jaws and The Silence of the Lambs, but the greatest horror films ever made never got anywhere near the Oscars.

These films should have been nominated for Best Picture the years they were released because many of them have stood the test of time and then some.

In no particular order:

Alien
Aliens
Halloween
Poltergeist
Frankenstein
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
The Shining
The Thing
Carrie
Rosemary’s Baby
The Babadook
The Birds
Misery
The Dead Zone
Don’t Look Now
Near Dark

And yes, Robert Eggars’ last film, The Witch. The Witch is still, I think, the best movie around the Salem Witch Trials, even if it does bring in the supernatural. It’s just a good movie.

Nosferatu might become one of the Best Picture contenders if something else anticipated but not yet seen drops out. That would mean a film like Blitz or Gladiator II, for instance. Then again, it could knock out one of those that everyone is assuming will get in but won’t. For instance, I have A Real Pain on my Best Picture predictions list right now, which looks something like this:

There is no table associated with this shortcode.

But most of the pundits, for whatever it’s worth, aren’t as high on A Real Pain as I am. I am also guessing that All We Imagine as Light will find a spot, and that too could be way off base. It will just come down to how many people love Nosferatu to vote for it in the number one slot. It would need hundreds of votes by people who thought it was the best film of the year.

As for whether they have more of a taste for horror than they used to, yes, what with the thousands of new international members who are younger than the usual 60-ish Academy member. Eggars, like Sean Baker and Brady Corbet, are the up-and-comers in the “new wave” of filmmakers who are writer/directors. Although are any directors out there not also writing their own scripts?

Nosferatu will also be strong for crafts nominations — costume, production design, etc. Looks good!