With spooky season looming, it’s fitting that two upcoming creature features are preparing to sink their claws into the awards race. In recent days, the filmmakers behind Godzilla Minus Zero and Werwulf have been making their cases not just for craft categories — where both expect to be competitive based on their Oscar-worthy pedigrees — but also for some above-the-line love.
Last Friday, Robert Eggers and Focus Features hosted a small group on the Universal lot for the first public screening of select Werewulf footage. Based on what we saw, you can expect Eggers’ medieval monster movie to be in play for the same Academy Awards as his 2024 version of Nosferatu. That spin on the seminal vampire story contended for cinematography, costume design, production design, and makeup and hairstyling. After playing several clips, Eggers also touted star Aaron Taylor-Johnson, whose striking transformation in the gripping opening moments is a tour-de-force of physical acting.
“To be Hollywood about it, it’s a career-defining performance,” Eggers said. “You haven’t seen anything like this from him, or from many people. I wrote this for Aaron for a lot of reasons. One, I knew about his dance background, and that he’d be able to be super athletic with the transformation, as you can see — very few people could do that, period. Also, he’s obviously very beautiful, but in a traditional masculine way, which also lends itself to this role very well. And Aaron has a haunted quality, which is something I look for in most of my actors.
“But the other thing is that Aaron is not a dark person,” Eggers continued. “He’s a really warm guy — such a warm, gentle, kind father in real life — and this is not his world. I knew it would be extra challenging for him, but that if it worked, it would be powerful for the audience, because this is someone who’s cursed and trapped in a world he doesn’t belong in and doesn’t want to be in, and he’s just stuck there. This was a really insane process for Aaron; to be pretty much all the time naked, covered in blood, in the woods in England, in Wales, screaming and going crazy. It was a really intense experience.”
With Werwulf not arriving until Christmas, is there a chance Taylor-Johnson could make a late push into the Best Actor race? He faces a few obstacles, including an already-stacked field and the Academy’s historic antipathy to horror — although last year’s dynamic duo of Sinners winner Michael B. Jordan and Weapons champ Amy Madigan might help rewrite that narrative. Given Nosferatu‘s Oscar showing and Focus’ traditionally strong campaigning, we won’t be sleeping on Taylor-Johnson as a dark-horse contender.
At the same time that the latest Werwulf trailer was racking up YouTube views, Godzilla Minus Zero roared into the New York Film Festival for its world premiere. Director Takashi Yamazaki‘s Godzilla Minus One won Best Visual Effects at the 2024 Academy Awards, entering the Oscar record books as the first Godzilla film to win a statuette and the first Japanese film to triumph in that category.
Based on those results, Godzilla Minus Zero is an early front-runner to repeat as this year’s Best VFX winner, in a category that’s expected to include such heavy hitters as The Odyssey, Dune: Part Three, Project Hail Mary, and Spider-Man: Brand New Day.
Asked by Variety if he had aspirations beyond Best VFX for Godzilla Minus Zero, Yamazaki replied candidly: “We had no idea we were going to get Best VFX, or even be nominated. Even a nomination was already a win for us with Godzilla Minus One. So I try not to think about it, but at the same time, if the possibility is not zero, it’s hard not to have a little bit of hope.”
While the general consensus among pundits post-premiere was that the sequel delivers crowd-pleasing action and a heart-tugging finale, it lacks a novel dramatic hook that could propel it into the major Oscar races, such as the alluded-to Best Picture. But we’re not about to tell the ginormous radioactive reptile that it’s not worthy of an above-the-line close-up.
