Oscars Celebrate Superheroes

Tonight, at the 86th Annual Academy Awards Ceremony, the Academy will honor movie heroes, including supeheroes and heroes of other genre fiction films. Considering how important they are to the movie industry, it seems only appropriate for Hollywood to give the capes and cowls set their due. We’ve decided to take this opportunity to look back at the Oscar winners and nominees in the superhero genre over the years.The modern superhero movie really started in 1978, when Christopher Reeve starred as the Man of Steel in Superman: The Movie. Superman, along with Star Wars, changed Hollywood forever by opening up the market for big, science fiction blockbusters. These days, it seems hard to imagine a summer without at least one big superhero film. Superman was well received, receiving three Oscar nominations in 1979 (Best Film Editing, Best Original Score, and Best Sound Mixing) and a Special Achievement Award for Visual Effects. Many still see Reeve as the definitive Superman following his iconic role in this film.In 1987, the world was introduced to a very different kind of hero in RoboCop. Paul Verhoeven’s gritty, gory satire of 1980s American culture was as dramatically different from Superman as you can imagine, but it remains a cult favorite today and was nominated for for three Academy Awards itself, winning the Oscar for Sound Effects Editing.