Godzilla: How a 70-year-old cinema icon finally made Oscars history
Being celebrated at the Oscars isn’t the be-all and end-all for a career, with some of the most important and influential names in the history of cinema having never been rewarded with a competitive prize.
Alfred Hitchcock never won an Academy Award for directing, and Steve McQueen was only ever nominated once. The list of legendary stars to have a glaring omission from their trophy cabinet extends to Rita Hayworth, Tom Cruise, Richard Burton, Montgomery Clift, Peter Sellers, Marlene Dietrich, David Lynch, Akira Kurosawa, Paul Thomas Anderson, and countless more genuine icons on either side of the camera.
However, 70 years into their big screen career, one of the most recognisable big-screen favourites has finally been given their moment in the sun. Neing a gigantic lizard with atomic fire breath and a penchant for reducing cities to nothing but smouldering rubble presumably hasn’t kept Godzilla at the forefront of the Academy’s thinking.
Ever since the 1954 original, the ‘King of the Monsters’ has been known the world over, giving rise to a filmography that’s covered pretty much everything genre filmmaking has to offer. And yet, throughout the entirety of its existence, Godzilla has never been heralded as a character with the potential to trouble awards season.
Toho’s marquee monster has headlined 33 Japanese features, been transplanted to the United States for Roland Emmerich’s diabolical 1998 reinvention, and been rebooted by Gareth Edwards to much better effect in 2014. It eventually became one of the pillars of Legendary Pictures’ MonsterVerse alongside King Kong, with Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire gearing up to cause serious collateral damage in March 2024.
That’s not to say Godzilla has been a bastion of cinematic excellence unfairly shut out of the Oscars conversation. Still, it’s strange that a long-running saga so renowned for its contributions to the world of fantasy filmmaking in a myriad of ways never scored so much as a solitary nomination until this year.
When it came, Godzilla Minus One writer and director Takashi Yamazaki accomplished a feat so rare that only once has it been achieved in the history of the Oscars, and it was by Stanley Kubrick and 2001: A Space Odyssey. The incredible creature feature saw Yamazaki join one of the all-time greats by becoming just the second filmmaker ever to have been nominated as part of the special effects team on a feature they also directed, securing its place in history books.
It may have taken 70 years, 38 full-length movies, and a cavalcade of multimedia tie-ins. However, that Oscar nod for ‘Best Visual Effects’ has finally secured Godzilla a first-ever Oscar nomination, and it stands a very good chance of continuing to match Kubrick’s seminal sci-fi by having its name read out on the night.
