The nominations for the 95th Academy Awards are here, and this year more than ever, more genre films have been nominated for Best Picture than any other year, those films being Everything Everywhere All at Once, Avatar: The Way of Water, and Top Gun: Maverick. This is a huge shift for the Academy, an institution that does recognize truly great films, but primarily recognizes those that can be categorized within the parameters of drama. This year was no different, with fantastic films like The Banshees of Inisherin and Tár being nominated for the top prize. That being said, movies like these are always expected to get nominated for Best Picture. There was the expectation for one, maybe two, genre movies to garner nominations in this category, but not three! This is hugely important.

Movies are a massive art form and are made up of so many different genres, so for dramas to be consistently and almost exclusively recognized as the best movies at the most important awards show that there is, just feels a bit silly. Nominations for Everything Everywhere, Avatar, and Top Gun are not just important for this year's Oscars, but could be a shift for the show moving forward.

The Oscars Have Historically Snubbed Genre Movies

Michelle Yeoh in 'Everything Everywhere All At Once'
Image via A24

The Academy's bias against genre films is not a recent thing, it has been around for forever. For decades now, sci-fi, action, horror, comedy, and thriller movies have almost always been shut out of awards contention. There have been exceptions in the past, but they are few and far between. Movies like The Wizard of Oz, the original Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T., Inception, and Get Out have been nominated for Best Picture, but it is a freak event when one actually wins.

The Silence of the Lambs, The Shape of Water, and The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King are all films that have taken home the biggest award of the night, yet these are only a few that can claim to have done so. Not every movie that appeals to a mass audience deserves to be nominated for the top prize, but sometimes films are widely celebrated simply because they are as great as people say, word of mouth works its magic, and a great movie ends up making a boat load of cash. The Best Picture race should be about the quality of the movies nominated, not the kind of movies.

RELATED: 2023 Academy Award Nominations: The Biggest Surprises and Snubs

Which Genre Films Received 2023 Best Picture Oscar Nominations?

It was an absolute thrill to see not one, not two, but three genre films get nominated for Best Picture this morning! Not only were these movies recognized within that category, they were celebrated in multiple. Everything Everywhere leads this year's race for the most nominations, coming out with 11 to its name. Top Gun: Maverick walked away with six nominations under its belt, and Avatar: The Way of Water with four, both films coming in heavy with the show's technical categories.

Not only were these three films shown some love this morning, Angela Bassett received a Best Supporting Actress nomination for her work in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Rian Johnson got a Best Adapted Screenplay nod for his work on Glass Onion, a Best Animated Feature nom was given to Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio, and more. The recognition for this year's wackiest and wildest corners of film is real!

The Oscars Overlooked Some Genre Gems

Mia Goth doing the quiet sign while looking down at someone in Pearl.
Image via A24

After two long years of very few releases, 2022 was a great year back at the movies, so nominating every film for their efforts would be impossible. That being said, it would have been nice to see a few more genre films held up for their greatness. For one, Mia Goth was absolutely incredible as Pearl in, you guessed it, Pearl, and should have been nominated for Best Actress, without a doubt. Cate Blanchett, Ana de Armas, and Michelle Yeoh are incredible and all, don't get me wrong, but man it would have been fun if the Academy decided to cut a rug and recognize Goth for her efforts! Other horror films like The Menu and Barbarian are two wildly unpredictable fan favorites that would have been a blast to see nominated for Best Original Screenplay.

It would have been nice to see some nods towards Nope, either for Jordan Peele's rich screenplay, Keke Palmer's performance, its massive direction, or the film's incredible cinematography from Hoyte van Hoytema. Come on, those nighttime scenes looked amazing! Speaking of cinematography, you'd be hard-pressed to think of many films from last year that looked as good as The Batman, with its fusion of Fincherian and Hitchcockian visuals capturing a gothic comic book world. Let's not forget The Northman, one of the best movies of the 2022. It would have been fun to see that film get nominated in the same vein as films like Braveheart and Ben-Hur, just nastier, covered in mud, and run through the mind of Robert Eggers. That movie is so great, it could have been held up for anything - Best Original Score, an acting nomination for Nicole Kidman, Jarin Blaschke for cinematography, Eggers for his incredible direction, and of course, Best Picture.

The Oscars Are Still Finding the Right Balance

Payakan Tulkun in Avatar the Way of Water
Image Via 20th Century Studios

There is a slight danger in going too far with nominating genre films for Best Picture. It would be terrible if things got too carried away and the Oscars became a populist awards show like the Grammys. We don't want the 10 films nominated for Best Picture to also be the top 10 highest grossing movies of the year, otherwise this morning's nominations would have ended up including Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Minions: The Rise of Gru. This isn't the MTV Movie Awards!

This also isn't a knock at those movies' individual qualities, but are they better than Banshees or The Fabelmans? That would be a stretch. It's all about finding the right balance and being completely truthful about the best movies of the year. I mean the award is called Best Picture after all, it shouldn't even have to be debated that horror films, action movies, comedies, thrillers, and sci-fi epics all can measure to the same degree of quality as a moving drama. If it's a year in which none of the genre films stacked up to the 10 best dramas, then that's just how that year shakes out, but every year shouldn't be that way. The point is, if it's 2008 and The Dark Knight is eligible for a Best Picture nomination (it is), it would probably be within your best interest to do so, right? Right??

The Academy seems to have had a bit of a change of heart with the films they chose to nominate at this year's Oscars. Avatar, Top Gun, and Everything Everywhere deserve their respective Best Picture nominations. They aren't just fun, crowd pleasing entertainment, they're genre films with a lot of heart, intention, and passion behind them - just as much as many of 2022's best dramas, and way more passion than any of 2022's Oscar-bait films. This could be said for so many more genre movies, but we have to get our start somewhere, and this is a great way to get things going. Let's hope that moving forward, the Best Picture race will continue to represent all the forms that movies take, just as they did this morning.