If there’s one thing we can all say about this year’s Oscar ceremony, it is that things didn’t exactly go quite as well as one might have hoped. After what is supposed to be Hollywood’s biggest night, more play has been given to the SNAFUs of the evening than has been written debating the merits of the award choices. But the one hiccup that has gotten the most unnecessary blowback was actually one of Oscar 2010’s most interesting moments.
Kristen Stewart and
Taylor Lautner (both of
Twilight fame) stepped out on stage and gave a brief, classy introduction to a montage of horror movies – a genre rarely represented at the Oscar’s.
So what is the problem? The montage, while including sequences from some of the very best and most popular horror films of all time, also included a moment from…wait for it…
Twilight. Imagine the teeth gnashing and braying over that decision. “TWILIGHT IS NOT HORROR!” bloggers screamed. And out came the essays. Oh, how the words flowed. I need not repeat nor quote them here; you’re already hearing them in your head - if you haven’t already read a few of them yourself. Needless to say, I agree with them on one level:
Twilight is not Horror. Not really. It’s romance dressed up in the trappings of modern gothic horror, as interpreted not by an expert in the genre, but rather a bored housewife reflecting back what she absorbed from pop culture. That said, I posit this: so what? Who gives a flying rat turd if Oscar lumped it into a horror montage? There was no disservice done here; quite the contrary. Oscar was doing horror a favor.
I know the Oscars likes to present itself as a lofty cultural event celebrating the best of the best in the art of cinema – but who are we kidding? It’s the world’s longest, most expensive and elaborate commercial, selling America first – then the rest of the world – on the good movies they probably didn’t bother to see last year. Make no mistake about it; this isn’t just about bragging rights. It’s about money. Oscar nods mean big money for mostly unprofitable films;
Oscar wins mean even more. After all, nobody needed convincing to see
Avatar, but the only way you were ever going to convince mainstream America to watch a film about an unlikable protagonist defusing bombs in an unpopular ongoing war was to give it six Oscars. End of story. Nobody saw it the first time, but within an hour of the broadcast, Amazon had sent out e-mails to all its customers offering them the chance to buy the night’s winners on DVD & Blu-Ray, with
The Hurt Locker front and center.
So when the Oscars has a montage hosted by a pair of actors riding on a cresting wave of tween-soaked popularity, and you ask yourself “why”, you have to think not like a jaded fan, but like an award show producer. By waltzing out Lautner and Stewart and working
Twilight into a reel of the greatest Horror films ever made, where they trying to convince horror buffs to reconsider
Twilight? Or were they selling little girls horror movies?
Think about it for a moment. If they wanted to convince horror fans that
Twilight was horror, they would have invited up
Robert Englund and
Jamie Lee Curtis to host the montage while citing the film in their introduction. Instead they brought up a pair of Teen Beat poster kids and had them give a succinct introduction to a 5 minute commercial for horror movies, aimed not at the horror convention going fanboys of the world, but 14 year old girls with disposable income that want to watch the movies Taylor Lautner watches. As it so happens, they were selling those little girls on some pretty great movies.
What do I care if a montage tells people that
Twilight is a horror movie? I know better than that. But you know what makes me happy? The idea of cinema loving teenagers going to their video store this week or cueing up their Netflix accounts and watching
The Exorcist for the first time. Or
A Nightmare on Elm Street. Or
Psycho. That was the point of this little endeavor. And I can think of no more noble an Oscar cause than turning the next generation onto some pretty incredible films. What kind of horror fans can really find fault with that?
Check out last week's Counterpoint