The Academy Award for Best Makeup is one of the youngest Oscars. It was first handed out in 1981, one year after the Academy took heat for not having a specific award that could recognize Christopher Tucker’s remarkable work for David Lynch’s “The Elephant Man.” Really, though, there had been mounting pressure on the Academy to honor makeup effects since the early 1970s, when Dick Smith helped Marlon Brando become Don Vito Corleone in “The Godfather” and transformed young Linda Blair into a demon in “The Exorcist.”
The first Oscar for Best Makeup went to the great Rick Baker for “An American Werewolf in London,” and it felt like validation for horror fans the world over. Our genre would probably never be deemed worthy of major Oscars, but here was a category that it would likely own for decades to come, because no one was doing more revolutionary work in this field than geniuses like Smith and Baker.
While genre films have always performed well in this category, the branch of the Academy tasked with singling out excellence in makeup effects has always been a tad squeamish. This is why gore maestros like Tom Savini and Greg Nicotero have never been nominated, while Rob Bottin has been nominated only once without winning. For gorehounds, the last time the Oscars got it right was in 1986, when Chris Walas and Stephan Dupuis took home the Best Makeup Oscar for their fierce, frightening, disgusting and ultimately heartbreaking work for David Cronenberg’s “The Fly.”
It’s been a long, long wait, but the 97th Academy Awards did the right thing and reminded the world that splatter is a vital art form by handing the Best Makeup and Hairstyling Oscar to Pierre-Olivier Persin, Stéphanie Guillon, and Marilyne Scarselli magnificently goopy practical f/x for Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance.”
A win for splatter masters like Romero, Argento and Fulci
If you were able to watch Fargeat’s body horror opus in a vacuum without a thought to the Oscars, you probably didn’t walk out of the theater thinking you’d just watched a film that would be nominated for five Academy Awards — and this is if you hadn’t run for the exits prior to that blood-and-viscera spewing finale. Even if you stuck around for the whole gory spectacle, you likely didn’t consider it a no-doubt frontrunner for the one category where it should’ve been the prohibitive favorite from jump.
But Fargeat’s film is undeniable, and, as a lifelong horror fanatic who’s been reading Fangoria since I was eight years old, it’s hard not to view Persin, Guillon and Scarselli’s win as validation for so many splatter classics. It’s a win for the movies of George A. Romero, Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci and so many other filmmakers whose gore-soaked visions continue to give us the sweetest, stickiest nightmares. Is it a sign that the Academy is getting over its aversion to splatter horror? Had they also nominated Chris Nash’s brilliantly gnarly “In a Violent Nature,” I would answer with a full-throated yes. For now, I think “The Substance” is an outlier, but who’s to say? The film industry is going through incredible upheaval. Let’s check back next year to see if we’re talking about honorary Oscar winner Tom Savini.
