Genre Flicks Get No Love from the Academy Awards. It’s Called the Bill Murray Syndrome

A lot of bad films have been nominated and won Academy Awards before. Did you know that Transformers has more Oscar-nominations than Shawshank Redemption? But that's because the sound editing and visual effects categories are the dumpster usually delegated to genre films and they can sweep all those very easily and tend to every year. And in the last few years, a lot of these more technical awards have even been moved out of the actual awards broadcast. But it's rare when a fantasy, horror or sci-fi movie gets real respect and is nominated in a writing, acting, directing, or even best picture category. Why does this bias exist? Why does genre have the scarlet letter of mainstream, and therefore mediocre, attached to it?

Well, sometimes, and especially more recently, it's the genres own fault, relying on truly bad CGI action sequences (Star Wars: Episode III) to tell a story instead of relying on a well-structured narrative (Star Wars: Episode IV) to do so. So to pay some honor and thanks to those genre movies who got the nominations they deserve, we give thanks in our gallery of horror, sci-fi and fantasy films that the grand poobah of entertainment awards has so graciously bestowed with on of its golden statuettes for a major category.