HBO Max’s Masterpiece With 93% On Rotten Tomatoes Highlights A Massive Oscars Failure

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The horror film Weapons, which was a big hit in 2025, is now popular on HBO Max. However, its snub at the Oscars highlights a continuing problem: the Academy often overlooks the quality of horror movies. Similarly, HBO Max’s hugely successful horror film Sinners seems to challenge a long-held belief about what kinds of films the Oscars typically recognize.

The Academy’s repeated overlooking of critically praised horror films like Hereditary and Pearl has led many to believe it unfairly dismisses the genre. While films like The Substance and Get Out occasionally receive recognition, Sinners feels like the clearest evidence against that claim.

Ryan Coogler’s 2025 film, Sinners, received an incredible 16 Oscar nominations, setting a new record and demonstrating that horror films can indeed earn Academy recognition. While this success seems to confirm a growing trend of the genre being honored during awards season, it’s still too early to celebrate a complete shift in the Academy’s preferences.

Weapons Deserved To Be Nominated For Best Picture

The success of Sinners clearly shows that horror films can be Oscar nominees – and a surprisingly large number of them, at that. But it’s important to remember that Coogler’s film is truly unique. Sinners was a rare, original movie with a $100 million budget and no connection to an existing franchise, and it brilliantly combined different genres in a way audiences hadn’t seen before.

Blending historical drama, intense character studies, terrifying siege elements, and the soulful energy of blues music, Sinners is a truly unique film. Drawing inspiration from movies like The Faculty and Inside Llewyn Davis, it creates a cinematic experience unlike anything seen before.

Given how unusual Sinners is, a more reliable way to understand the Academy’s view of horror is to consider their reaction to the genre’s second most successful film of the year. Weapons, the second film from Barbarian director Zach Cregger, cost just $38 million to make and delivers a gripping, intense horror experience with a strong cast including Julia Garner, Josh Brolin, and Amy Madigan.

“Weapons” tells the story of a small town thrown into chaos when an entire classroom of children vanishes overnight. The film is a darkly funny, scary, and sharply satirical take on the event, and surprisingly, it also offers moments of heartfelt emotion and hope. While many consider Cregger’s second movie to be one of the best horror films of the last ten years, it wasn’t recognized with a Best Picture nomination.

Weapons’ Oscar Nomination Makes Its Best Picture Snub Worse

Despite a Best Supporting Actress nomination for Madigan, the film Weapons received very little attention from the Academy Awards. Although the movie’s ending isn’t the typical Oscar-winning style, director Cregger’s unique and bold debut still merits recognition.

Despite receiving more positive reviews, the fact that F1 was nominated for Best Picture instead of Weapons shows that critical praise wasn’t enough to win over the Academy. Weapons has a much higher score on Rotten Tomatoes (93% versus F1‘s 82%), but its intelligent story and strong acting weren’t enough to earn a nomination.

Weapons’ Oscar Snub Does Have Another Justification

Even being charitable to the Academy, there’s another reason their reaction to Cregger’s film might have been negative. Weapons is an anthology movie – a collection of shorter stories – and the Academy Awards historically hasn’t favored this format, as seen with films like Pulp Fiction, Magnolia (which heavily inspired Weapons), The French Dispatch, and Kinds of Kindness.

Anthology films, even those not in the horror genre, are often overlooked by the Academy Awards. While there are many guesses as to why, the main reason seems to be that the short-story format doesn’t allow actors to deliver the powerful, sustained performances usually needed to earn Best Actor or Best Actress nominations.

The Oscars Have A Complicated History With The Horror Genre

It’s probably an oversimplification to say the Oscars don’t like horror films. Looking back at the awards’ history, the criticism of not recognizing Weapons seems less fair. The Oscars have actually nominated six horror movies for Best Picture over the years, starting with The Exorcist in 1973.

While horror films aren’t often recognized by the Academy Awards, they’ve had moments of success. The Exorcist won three Oscars in 1974, and The Silence of the Lambs famously won Best Picture in 1990 – a first for the genre that hasn’t been repeated. More recently, films like The Sixth Sense, Black Swan, Get Out, and The Substance received nominations, but ultimately didn’t win any awards.

The positive reception of Sinners suggests the Oscars are becoming more accepting of horror films, a genre they’ve often overlooked in the past. While Ryan Coogler’s movie may encourage voters to consider horror, the snub of Weapons shows the awards still have progress to make in fully embracing the genre.

Look, as a big movie fan, I’ve always been a little frustrated with the Academy Awards. Sure, every now and then they recognize a genuinely scary, well-made horror film like The Exorcist or The Silence of the Lambs, but usually, the genre gets completely overlooked. The fact that Weapons, a film that critics loved, couldn’t even snag a Best Picture nomination just proves it. Until a movie like Weapons gets some real recognition, horror just isn’t going to feel fully accepted by the Oscars, and honestly, that’s a shame.

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2026-01-28 19:01