As a lifelong horror fan, I think the Academy Awards are a joke. Considered the biggest night in Hollywood, the annual event does anything but celebrate film. If anything, it’s an enormous circle-jerk that’s basically one big popularity contest. If the Academy actually cared about film, they’d find a way to incorporate other genres outside of “Best Sound Editing”, “Sound Mixing”, and “Visual Effects”. Somehow, our genre has infiltrated their uptight fiasco, and some aren’t too happy about it.

Ignoring Guillermo del Toro‘s The Creature From the Black Lagoon-inspired The Shape of Water, Universal Pictures and Blumhouse’s Get Out is being propped up, with the film being nominated for “Best Picture”, Jordan Peele nominated for “Best Director”, and star Daniel Kaluuya being nominated for “Best Lead Actor”. The disrespect started earlier when the Golden Globes classified the film as a comedy, which is not only ridiculous, but also slightly racist. A horror film in the Oscar hunt? God forbid…

Digressing, a shocking report on Vulture alleges that older Oscars voters are snubbing Get Out … without having even seen the film! Here’s the bit:

That’s all the more important because some of our new members say they ran into interference from an older, more traditional wing of the Academy when it came to evaluating Peele’s movie. “I had multiple conversations with longtime Academy members who were like, ‘That was not an Oscar film,’” said one new voter. “And I’m like, ‘That’s bullshit. Watch it.’ Honestly, a few of them had not even seen it and they were saying it, so dispelling that kind of thing has been super important.”

Yes, younger members are calling out the older generation for dismissing Get Out without having even watched it. The sad part? This isn’t the slightest bit surprising. Are any of you shocked? I’m not. However, there is a shred of good news…

Said another new Oscar voter, herself a veteran of awards-season campaigns, “I think Get Out is a movie that we wouldn’t have necessarily thought of as an Academy movie two years ago. It doesn’t really fall into any of the boxes that we think these movies do. It came out in February, and that’s almost never worked for Academy … it actually is provocative. It questions everything. It’s brilliant.”

While this voter commends the film, she does accidentally condemn it. Why does it matter when a film was released, and more importantly, why are there even check “boxes” that a film needs to fall into? If a film is truly great or deserving of acclaim, why does any of that matter? Even with progressive thinkers in the group, the article proves that we’re a long way from taking the Oscars seriously…at least as a horror fan. With that said, please enjoy a (brief) look back at a horror history at the Academy Awards.