Jacob Elordi as Frankenstein’s monster could break this truly horrifying Oscar nominations curse
Zach Laws
Halloween might be over, but that doesn't mean this year's Oscars won't be a monster mash.
As Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein rises through the ranks in the Best Picture race, so too does Jacob Elordi, who's itching to crack the top five in our Oscar odds for Best Supporting Actor. Should he earn his first Oscar bid for playing the reanimated creation of Dr. Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac), Elordi would be one of the few actors to compete for playing a monster.
The Australian actor currently ranks sixth in Gold Derby's predicted nominations for Best Supporting Actor, behind Sean Penn (One Battle After Another), Stellan Skarsgård (Sentimental Value), Paul Mescal (Hamnet), Benicio del Toro (One Battle After Another), and Adam Sandler (Jay Kelly).
Acting nominations for horror movies aren't unheard of, but they are surprisingly rare. For every Demi Moore in The Substance and Ellen Burstyn in The Exorcist, there's a Toni Collette in Hereditary and Lupita Nyong'o in Us.
Yet actors earning Oscar nominations for playing monsters are so rare that even iconic performances like Boris Karloff in the original Frankenstein couldn't break through — or even, for that matter, Robert De Niro, who already had two Oscars on his shelf by the time he played the creature in Kenneth Branagh's Frankenstein remake.
One actor who didn't suffer from that bias was Fredric March, who won the 1931 Best Actor prize for playing the titular dual role in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Granted, he had to share that award with Wallace Beery, who triggered a tie when he came within one vote of winning for The Champ (the rule at the time stated that a tie would occur if two contenders came within three votes of each other). Nevertheless, March's victory was a significant one for the horror genre, one that has yet to be repeated.
Willem Dafoe was in play with Shadow of the Vampire, for which he earned a Best Supporting Actor nomination in 2000. Dafoe played Nosferatu star Max Schreck as a real-life vampire, not just a fictional one, lending an eerie meta-textual vibe to an iconic horror movie performance. Although he won the Independent Spirit Award, Dafoe lost the Oscar to Traffic star Benicio Del Toro.
Aside from that, you really have to stretch. Although heavy makeup helped make Best Supporting Actress nominee Linda Blair appear monstrous in The Exorcist, the little girl possessed by a demon wasn't exactly a monster. The same goes for Ruth Gordon, who won Best Supporting Actress for playing a Satan-worshipping neighbor in Rosemary's Baby; Sissy Spacek, who reaped a Best Actress nom for her performance as telepathic teen Carrie White in Carrie; or Anthony Hopkins, who took home the Best Actor prize as Hannibal "The Cannibal" Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs. Perhaps the closest we get is Martin Landau, who won Best Supporting Actor for embodying Dracula star Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood.
The list of snubs is truly horrifying. No Gary Oldman for Bram Stoker's Dracula, no Jeff Goldblum for The Fly, no Michael Keaton for Beetlejuice. It's enough to make you wonder if Oscar voters are just scaredy-cats. Yet Elordi, whose star has been on the rise since Euphoria, could break through by imbuing his interpretation of Frankenstein's creature with a touch of sympathy that's often lacking from movie monsters. It certainly helps that his film is currently predicted to crack the Best Picture top 10, a rarity for horror movies.
So, perhaps Elordi's Oscars chances are more ... alive ... than you might think.
