Oscar buzz and genre snubs: will the Academy finally give sci-fi, fantasy and horror their due?

Ah, the Oscars. That perennial exercise in Hollywood patting itself on the back with all the subtlety of a fireworks display, while the rest of us squint at our screens and wonder how many of these movies we’ve actually seen.

At least two years ago there was something for genre fans to crow about: Everything Everywhere All at Once drove all before it, making and resurrecting careers while smartly satirising Marvel’s multiverse saga before the latter even had the chance to collapse under the weight of its own convoluted timelines.

Related: How did Everything Everywhere All At Once sweep the Oscars?

And those of us of an older vintage will always have 2004, when The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King stormed the Oscars like a hobbit on second breakfast, sweeping up 11 statuettes and proving that a fantasy epic, when executed with enough heart, grandeur and bloody-minded ambition, could leave the Academy no choice but to hand over every prize in sight.

At other times it’s been easy to despair at the Academy’s unwillingness to reward fantasy fare. Genre films often dominate the technical gongs but struggle to crack the “prestige” barriers of best picture, director or acting nominations. Animated films, no matter how innovative, rarely break out of their category. The remarkable Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, for example, won best animated film in 2019 but didn’t get a nod in any of the more celebrated categories.

Many people may expect Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two, a critical smash that also made a more-than-decent $714m (£584m) at the global box office, to spice things up when nominees for the 97th Academy Awards are officially announced on Thursday. A best picture nod is a genuine possibility since the Academy expanded the category to 10 nominees, but it’s likely Villeneuve will once again need to be content with nominations in numerous technical categories (Dune won four of them, along with score and cinematography, in 2022).

Is the Academy holding off in order to reward the Canadian film-maker’s great achievement when part three rolls around, as a previous generation of voters garlanded Peter Jackson for Lord of the Rings in 2004? If so, the wait could take longer than counting every grain of sand on Arrakis, given Villeneuve hasn’t yet committed to a start date and will be working from Frank Herbert’s weaker sequel, Dune Messiah.

Then there’s Wicked, Jon M Chu’s rousing adaptation of the Broadway phenomenon. It has all the hallmarks of a potential nominee: beloved source material, powerhouse performances and more glittering spectacle than a Las Vegas residency. Musicals have always had an easier time courting Oscar voters (see: Chicago), though Wicked’s abundant fantasy elements might just make it an awkward fit for an Academy that still prefers stories of “real” people doing “real” things – often in corsets, sometimes while battling addiction, and occasionally while quietly enduring some form of historical oppression.

Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance is such a rare example of a science-fiction horror movie with something to say that it could easily be mistaken for a feature-length episode of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror. Demi Moore is widely tipped for a best actress nod – or even win – while co-star Margaret Qualley looks likely to be in the running for supporting actress.

Meanwhile, Robert Eggers’ moody, meticulously crafted and unapologetically weird Nosferatu has a shot in a number of technical categories, such as production design and makeup and hairstyling. A remake of the 1922 classic, Eggers’ version is dripping with his trademark love for shadow-drenched visuals and historical detail, making it less of a horror movie and more of an immersive descent into madness.

The only problem is that horror at the Oscars has historically fared about as well as vampires at a garlic festival. Maybe, just maybe, this year will be different.