MARCH 8, 2010 12:06PM
Oscars Give Horror Cinema a Shout-Out. Why?
Just a few quick thoughts about the tribute to horror films at last night's Oscar Awards.
This tribute seemed to come out of nowhere, to be honest, and it felt a bit random. Why did they single out horror? Why not a romance tribute, or a Western tribute? There may well have been some of these, and I just don't know it.
Has the Academy really been that hostile to the genre? I would say that quality horror cinema and acting has been recognized by the Academy. The montage alone showed various classics that won for different categories, including "The Exorcist", "Rosemary's Baby" and "Silence of the Lambs" (which was forgotten about when Lautner & Stewart claimed that the last time The Academy recognized horror films was 37 years ago for "The Exorcist").
I supposed I shouldn't be puzzled by Kristen Stewart and Taylor Lautner presenting the montage, except that anyone can see that "Twilight" and "New Moon" aren't really horror films. And the montage, if I'm not mistaken, included clips from "Edward Scissorhands" and other films dealing with the gothic and fantastic, but not necessarily horror.
Is an immensely powerful and important work like "The Exorcist" discredited by being lumped in with "Child's Play"? Or is it impossible to have a quality classic of the genre in this day and age? And on the other side of the coin, do we really need the gloriously awful and trashy Z-list fare, or the accidental mistakes, to be given faux-respectability? (A warning: I'm a fan of some awful, awful films. I'll post extensively on "Exorcist II: The Heretic" at some point, a movie I love deeply).
There's also the matter of Roger Corman's special Oscar, and I'm shamefully not very well-versed in his work. Time to pad the Netflix queue.
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