The Oscars Said "Nope" To Nope & Fans Are Pissed
The people have spoken.
Jordan Peele’s career since leaving Key & Peele has not gone the way most would have expected. Although he became famous for laughs, his move to becoming a serious director of socially conscious horror films has been a lovely surprise. His first hit out of the gate, Get Out, was so good, even the Academy couldn’t ignore it, despite its penchant for dismissing horror genre fare. But these tweets and memes over the decision to snub his latest film, Nope, with zero nominations for the 2023 Oscars, prove fans are paying attention.
Unlike Get Out and Peele’s follow-up film Us, despite being a “horror” genre film, Nope is actually the sort of story Hollywood usually showers with nominations. Academy voters love movies about making movies and people who live in and around the world of Hollywood — for instance, The Fabelmans, Steven Spielberg’s barely fictionalized story of how he became one of Hollywood’s most decorated storytellers, landed seven nominations.
Nope is about a family who has spent generations supplying horses to Hollywood for big-budget films. Their story is embedded within the real-life history of early movie-making. Though the horror plot revolves around the arrival of extraterrestrials, the protagonists’ response to their appearance is to try to film it and make a movie. It’s precisely the sort of inside baseball and insular storytelling that usually appeals to Academy members.
Except in this case, not so much.
It wasn’t just that Nope got skipped for the topline awards (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor and Actress, and Best Supporting Actor and Actress). That’s pretty normal for genre films. But audiences are mad that it got skipped entirely for even the technical awards, including the sound design, which was haunting.
Of course, viewers also had a lot of opinions about those failures to even shortlist any of the topline performances.
However, the Academy ignoring good films is a reality of life. For those who follow the Oscars, it was less a case of being mad than just extremely disappointed.
Fans will have to comfort themselves by rewatching Nope, streaming on Peacock. The 95th Academy Awards ceremony airs live at 8 p.m. ET on ABC on Sunday, March 12.
