No Acceptance Speech
The world salutes genre in 2000... but what of 2001?
      by Rachel Hyland

The Academy Awards -- Genre Credentials

The Oscars have been traditionally kinder to genre than the Emmy Awards. Depending on how broad you make the definition of genre -- and we tend to go for "pretty damn broad" 'round these parts -- in the seventy years of Oscar there have been at least five genre winners, and six of the last seven Best Pictures -- Schindler's List, Forrest Gump, Braveheart, The English Patient, Titanic and Shakespeare in Love -- all qualify under the Alternate History ruling. Schindler's List, also, was clearly a horror film, and The English Patient gets to be genre just for the terror, the terror that came from having to watch it. Oh, and Babe was nominated in 1996, which, aside from being genre, was also as cute as cute can be, and really should have won just for that.

Jack Nicholson, as good as it got in 1975.

Presented by The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and voted for by all their membership, Oscar has saluted even films like Ghost, in the form of a Best Supporting Actress nod for Whoopi Goldberg, and Martin Landau won Best Supporting Actor as Bela Lugosi in the vastly under-rated Ed Wood. Louise Fletcher (the icky Kai Winn from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine), won in 1975 for One Flew Over the Cookoo's Nest, as did Jack Nicholson, and, of course, Thomas Harris' Silence of the Lambs produced Oscars for Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins, and the film itself. In 1989 and 1990, comic book movies Batman and Dick Tracy won for art direction -- and, in fact, Star Wars won that same category in 1977 -- and cinematography has always favored the genre-ish -- with wins for pictures like Spartacus, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Even in Costume Design, Star Wars and the abysmal Winona Ryder-ridden Bram Stoker's Dracula came up trumps, and naturally, the make-up award has been genre's own, with wins to such diverse productions as Planet of the Apes, The Fly (mmm... Jeff Goldblum...), Beetlejuice, Terminator 2 and Men In Black (mmm... Will Smith...), among others.

In the Original Song category, genre likewise dominates. Disney is in large part responsible for this, of course -- the day that "Hakuna Matata" was nominated was a dark day for us all -- and Disney's animated classics won four out of seven awards from 1989-1995. In the Original Score category, meanwhile, we've seen music from The Omen, Jaws, Star Wars and E.T. merit approval -- as well as the scores from The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King, obviously.

And that's not even counting this year's inexplicable Tarzan victory...

Oscars 2000

The boy sees dead people. Give him a damn award.

This year produced a bumper crop of genre-related Oscar nominees, if not actual Uncle Oscars to show for them. Original Screenplay offered two such, as did Best Director and Best Picture, bringing the 2000 Oscar genre nominee tally to a whopping 37 -- and that's not even counting all the technical wizardry ones. There was Haley Joel Osment, seeing dead people in The Sixth Sense. Toni Colette as his mother. And Spike Jonze's truly bizarre use of John Cusack that was Being John Malkovich earned nominations for Best Supporting Actress Catherine Keener, as well as Best Screenplay and Best Director. Oh, and let us not forget that horror maestro Stephen King's spooky-ooky The Green Mile serial novel was adapted into a film, and nominated for all kinds of awards.

Keanu.

And 2000 was certainly the year of The Matrix. Four nominations, four awards, all technical and not a one for 11th Hour Reader's Choice Awards Best Actor, Keanu Reeves. Nevertheless, the triumph of the Wachowski brothers' Gibsonian masterpiece over George Lucas' disappointing Episode 1 in the visual effects categories at least showed that discerning movie-goers everywhere knew what they were about when they made The Matrix such an unexpected phenomenon.

In other genre news, Sleepy Hollow was nominated for Best Costume Design (though beaten out by the Alternate History Gilbert and Sullivan story, Topsy Turvy), and it actually won for Best Cinematography. Hell, even The Mummy wound up with a nomination this year (for Best Sound), and a world in which a movie featuring a scantily-clad Brendan Fraser can be nominated for an Oscar is one in which you can't help but enjoy living. Though Bicentennial Man also got nominated... but we won't dwell on that for too long, will we? Best to contemplate Fight Club's nomination instead.

And, again, in the Best Song category, genre kicked musical ass. Sarah McLachlan (who must surely be on the most soundtracks ever) sang the lilting "When She Loved Me" from Toy Story 2, Phil Collins sang a song of Tarzan, and this year a surprise entry from the wacky team of Parker and Stone offered up Robin Williams puffing his way through "Blame Canada" from the decade's best musical, South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut. It didn't win, of course, that stupid Tarzan song did... don't you just wish the Academy had gone with "Uncle Fucka"?

But then, even the Golden Globes didn't go that far...

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