The internet has spoken: “Army of the Dead” is the #OscarsFanFavorite movie of the year.
Announced Sunday during the 94th Academy Awards, the battle of Twitter fandoms saw Zack Snyder’s zombie heist thriller beat out contenders including box-office smash “Spider-Man: No Way Home” and best picture nominee “Dune” to take the fan-favorite award.
Considering Snyder’s fans manifested an entire four-hour director’s cut of “Justice League” by rallying behind a social media campaign for years, “Army of the Dead” winning a contest that relied on a Twitter hashtag is not that surprising.
The gory (and lengthy) “Army of the Dead” sees Dave Bautista as the leader of a rag-tag group of mercenaries aiming to rob a casino amid a zombie apocalypse.
Snyder “knows he’s picking at the bones of a genre that’s already been cannibalized many times over; in pushing the carnage to numbing maximalist extremes, he’s saluting and mocking his forebears and trying to top them all anyway,” wrote Times film critic Justin Chang in his review. “More than anything, he’s trying to top himself, namely his own 2004 remake of George Romero’s ‘Dawn of the Dead,’ his first and best feature.”
Although this recognition is not an actual Oscar, this marks the first time the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has presented a fan-driven award during the Oscars telecast.
Meanwhile, the winners of eight Oscars categories — film editing, makeup and hairstyling, original score, production design, sound, documentary short subject, animated short and live-action short — were presented before the start of the live broadcast.