Director Zack Snyder’s cult of fans came out in full force, it seems. The filmmaker’s zombie-heist movie Army of the Dead won the inaugural (and rather controversial) fan-favorite award at Sunday’s Oscars. The winner was judged on the basis of votes cast on Twitter. Snyder also won the Oscars Cheer Moment, for Zack Snyder’s Justice League—a four-hour director’s cut of the much-maligned 2017 superhero film.
Army of the Dead beat out other popular films such as Spider-Man: No Way Home and Cinderella. Other contenders included The Power of the Dog, Tick, Tick… Boom! and Minamata. Although this isn’t an official category, meaning that the winner wasn’t presented with an actual Oscar, time was especially taken out to mention Army of the Dead in an already overlong telecast that had come under fire for removing eight categories from the live ceremony.
The Academy introduced these new categories in an effort to boost interest in the Oscars, in the face of dwindling ratings and a general sense of apathy among the audience. Voting was conducted from February 14 to March 3, with Cinderella finishing second.
This isn’t the first time that the Academy has taken such measures. After the 2009 ceremony, it was announced that the Best Picture category would be expanded to include up to 10 nominees, in a perceived response to the previous year’s The Dark Knight failing to score a Best Picture nod. More recently, they announced a Best Popular Film category, which was quickly axed after people complained.
But no such take-backs were offered on these two new unofficial categories, even as film fans criticized the Academy for initiating something that could so easily be manipulated. But more egregious was the decision to remove eight “below-the-line” categories from the live telecast, and to pre-tape the presentations for those awards. Because, as we now know, this year’s ceremony was longer than last year’s, which included every category in the live telecast.
Love for Snyder has always been strong, and the filmmaker’s fans paid to fly a plane across Hollywood on Sunday, demanding, yet again, that Warner Bros. “Restore the SnyderVerse.” The filmmaker himself has acknowledged the fan-favorite movement a couple of times on Twitter, which, as we saw with the “Release the SndyerCut” movement, is all the encouragement that his fans need.
Starring Dave Bautista, Ella Purnell, Tig Notaro, Omari Hardwick and Matthias Schweighöfer as members of a ragtag team of thieves who infiltrate a zombie-infested quarantine zone to steal a pile of cash, Army of the Dead was released on Netflix on May 14 last year. A sequel is in development.