It Should Have Been Nominated!: ‘The Thing’ ~ Digital Library

There are only so many Academy Award nominations available every year and trying to quantify the quality of art is a feckless task and who even cares what wins or gets nominated for Oscars given the Academy’s history of Getting It Wrong but listen, the Oscars are fun.

Awards season? It’s fun. Even if the act of deeming a film the “best picture of the year” seems antithetical to the nature of art, the awards cycle creates a three-ish month period in which the cultural discourse largely revolves around the craft behind filmmaking, often shining a light on underseen gems and independent releases that many casual moviegoers wouldn’t know to make the time for otherwise.

All of this is to say that while not winning an Oscar has never actively hurt the legacy of a film, it’s fun to talk about all of the times the Academy got it wrong. And of course, “got it wrong” is subjective but also, is it? Is there really a good argument for The King’s Speech winning Best Picture over The Social Network? There’s not. I promise you, there’s not.

With awards season fully underway, we’re going to dive all the way into the discourse over the next few weeks. Every week we’re going to take a look at a different movie that didn’t receive Oscar nominations (or at least didn’t receive the ones it deserved) and examine why it warranted recognition from the Academy, why it may not have made the cut at the time, which nominee it should replace, and whether or not it should have won the award in question. Our inaugural film? John Carpenter’s 1982 masterpiece The Thing.

Carpenter’s 70s/80s run is pretty untouchable in the grand scheme of filmographies. It contains a couple of cult classics, one of the better Stephen King adaptations, and two bonafide genre-defining masterpieces. It’s even more impressive when you realize he was more or less putting out a movie a year for nearly a decade and that there’s not a single dud in his entire 1978 to 1988 run. A decade of pure, perfect cinema. The dude is a legend.

However, he peaked in 1982 with his remake of the 1951 film The Thing From Another World. For the uninitiated, here’s the jist: a group of researchers confined to a small base in Antarctica uncover a shapeshifting alien and soon find themselves overcome by paranoia as they realize that not only could this Thing be any of them, but that they can’t let it leave the base for fear of it assimilating the world’s population. It combines elements of the thriller, sci-fi flick, and horror movie to create a chilling Cold War analogue.

Photo Credit: Universal Pictures

Let’s address this upfront: nobody in 1983 was clamoring for The Thing to receive any Oscar nominations. The film notoriously bombed at the box office, thanks in no part to the success of E.T: The Extra-Terrestrial that summer (audiences weren’t quite in the mood for evil aliens after that one). It also received a critical panning like no other, with magazine Cinefastique dubbing it “the most hated film of all time.” With such an icy (SORRY) reception, it’s no wonder the film didn’t garner any nominations come awards season.

But, this isn’t 1982. This is 2020, baby, and we know better now. We recognize The Thing for what it is: a perfect movie with a perfect script, perfect performances, a perfect score, and perfect special effects. The pacing? Masterful. The acting throughout, but especially from Kurt Russell, Keith David, and Wilford Brimley? Nuanced. Ennio Morricone’s thudding synth score? Iconic.

If anything, it’s almost appropriate that these weren’t appreciated in their time. Short of a few hits like Halloween, the prime of Carpenter’s filmography is almost exclusively made up of movies that were box office bombs or critical flops that went on to become appreciated at least as cult classics and, more often, important films. His masterwork both appropriately and unfortunately features the starkest contrast between initial reception and legacy.

It Should Have Been Nominated For: Best Visual Effects, Best Screenplay

Photo Credit: Universal Pictures

Let’s start with Visual Effects as it’s the one category from the 55th Academy Awards that is undeniably stacked. The nominees are Blade Runner, Poltergeist, and E.T., which took home the prize. There’s not a bad one in the bunch, and it’s a small pool of nominees as it is, making a cut all the more difficult.

Given E.T.’s undeniably revelatory puppetry and the all-around stunning design and effects that create the world of Blade Runner, we’re going to have to cut Poltergeist in order for The Thing to secure its nomination. Both are killer but the effects in The Thing are, in retrospect, just a tad more iconic than those of Poltergeist. The spider scene alone warrants the nomination E.T. remains the winner.

The screenplay category is a bit tougher to call, namely because the category it should be nominated in is a bit unclear. In 1983, the categories for screenplay were classified as “Written Directly for the Screen” and “Based on Material From Another Medium.” The Thing isn’t, by today’s standards, an original screenplay, but it was not adapted from material from another medium. Based on those standards, we’re going to have The Thing competing in Best Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen. Yell at me on Twitter if you need to.

Photo Credit: Universal Pictures

The nominees in that category in 1983 were Gandhi (which won), An Officer and a Gentleman, Diner, E.T., and Tootsie. It’s a pretty solid lineup of screenplays including two certified classics in E.T. and Tootsie as well as an underrated sleeper pick in Barry Levinson’s Diner. This column wouldn’t be any fun if we didn’t get at least a little disruptive so here’s the call: Gandhi is out. It had a killer run at the Oscars that year (11 nominations and eight wins, including Best Picture and Best Director) so it’s hard to feel bad about taking one away – plus as far as big winners at the Oscars go, it hasn’t aged terribly well both as a film and given what we know about Gandhi today.

We’ll give The Thing its due, then, with a nomination for Best Screenplay. The new winner: Man, can y’all believe Tootsie didn’t take this? Seriously, what a perfect script. The screenplay categories have become something of the Film Twitter awards over the last few years, with films like Get Out, The Big Short, and Moonlight taking prizes home and hits like Ex Machina and Carol bagging nominations. It only feels right that something with such genuine longevity as Tootsie take the prize. That leaves The Thing with the aforementioned Ex Machina-style nod, the, “Hey, we usually don’t mess with genre works but what you did is kind of undeniable.” prize.

Don’t lose any sleep over The Thing not getting the Oscars love it deserved back at the 55th installment of the awards show. Carpenter himself could probably care less and would be the first to tell you that he’s more than happy to kick back with some video games, play a few gigs with his killer band, and wait for the next massive residuals check to come in the mail. In the end, he won a legacy that few will ever be able to match. That’s way cooler than a gold statue.

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