Brian Earl Spilner said:
I think the thing that bugs me most about Demi Moore not winning is not necessarily her losing, but the fact that the Academy continues to disregard horror as a legitimate genre. (Snubbing Toni Colette for a nomination for Hereditary is maybe the worst example of this.)
I can't even think of the last major acting win for a horror movie since what, Silence of the Lambs?
Edit: I guess Portman for Black Swan. But really both of those examples are more thriller than horror.
In this instance, I think it was less about snubbing horror and more about snubbing a ****ty movie.
I didn't want to bring a bunch of negatively to
The Substance thread, so I stayed out of it, but I absolutely hated that movie and hardly know anyone else who liked it either. I can handle the gore/body horror, and I totally get what it was going for in terms of satire, I just think it completely missed the mark, re: the latter. Yes, it was certainly memorable, and I can appreciate certain elements, but it could have been so much more effective in getting its message across if it was even slightly better-written. I don't know, it just felt lazy to me, on multiple levels, constantly aiming for shock above any kind of coherency or character work. There was a really good movie in there somewhere, but it needed someone like David Cronenberg to bring it out, not someone clearly trying to be a cheap imitation.
Anyway, I heard a lot of Academy members basically felt the same way. Granted, the Academy
does have a bias against horror, I just don't think this was the movie to break through that bias.