Guillermo del Toro is the patron saint of genre films.
The filmmaker has spent his entire career crafting empathetic, articulate works which explore the plight of those deemed monstrous in one way or another in the form of genre films. His very first film, Cronos, released in 1992, began this trend and the filmmaker hasn’t let up since. Now, over 30 years later, in 2026, del Toro has received his second Best Picture nomination, this time for his new film, Frankenstein. What I find particularly striking about del Toro is not only his innate fascination with the monstrous and beautiful ways in which he captures these creatures as three-dimensional characters cinematically, but also the ways in which he is able to bring such genre fare into mainstream awards conversations.
Historically, awards season has been unkind to genre films. But somehow, del Toro manages to slice through all of the noise that generally buffers such conversations, and in doings so, has managed to push the relationship between these awards circuits and genre films forward in palpable ways.
To better understand this, let’s wind the clicks back to 2007, where Guillermo del Toro’s universally praised film Pan’s Labyrinth was nominated for multiple Academy Awards. Crucially, however, it was not nominated for Best Picture. Though the film was one of the most highly acclaimed of the year, and even won in categories such as Best Cinematography, it was excluded from mainline consideration. Instead, that year’s five Best Picture nominees were The Departed, The Queen, Little Miss Sunshine, Letters from Iwo Jima, and Babel. The majority of these are straight-forward dramas that remain indicative of where the Academy’s loyalty lied during this period of time.
However, things began to change in a big way the next time Guillermo would score a bevy of nominations. In 2018, not only was his film The Shape of Water nominated for Best Picture, but it actually won the award, netting him a Best Director Oscar as well. In addition to this, del Toro’s take on the Creature from the Black Lagoon story was also nominated alongside fellow genre works such as Jordan Peele’s Get Out, which also scored a Best Picture nom that year.
For a frame of reference, for years prior to 2018, Best Picture had almost exclusively been given out to more prestigious, straight-ahead dramas; Spotlight, 12 Years a Slave, The King’s Speech, etc. The only fantasy film to win Best Picture beforehand was Peter Jackson's third Lord of the Rings movie, The Return of the King, in 2003. The Shape of Water’s win was a huge upset, and one that pushed up against the perceived boundaries of the awards system in fascinating ways. In the years that followed, other genre films would tread the same path to Best Picture victory that del Toro’s film did. Films like Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite or the Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once were huge wins from works that were unapologetically genre-filled, and further paved the way for what was to come.
This year, not only is Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein nominated for Best Picture, but it is also alongside other genre films like Yorgos Lanthimos’ science-fiction black comedy Bugonia, Paul Thomas Anderson’s sprawling action-comedy-thriller-epic One Battle After Another, and Ryan Coogler’s horror film Sinners. In this way, this year’s Oscars is something of a victory lap for del Toro, a marked chance to examine just how far the system has come in the decades he has been actively pursuing cinematic greatness under the guise of genre filmmaking. Guillermo del Toro has played an inextricable role in furthering the legitimacy of modern-day genre pictures in the eyes of the Academy and beyond, and for that, I am eternally grateful to him.
Now, maybe they can give him a retroactive Oscar for making the coolest comic book sequel of the last twenty years with Hellboy II: The Golden Army.