Obsession Oscar buzz: the $750,000 horror hit wants 15 Oscars
A 26-year-old director's micro-budget horror movie out-grossed half the summer's blockbusters, and now its studio is campaigning it like it's Oppenheimer.
The for-your-consideration campaign is real, and it is not modest. Focus Features is pushing Obsession in all 15 Oscar categories it's eligible for, per Variety: Best Picture, Best Director and Original Screenplay for Curry Barker, Best Actress for Inde Navarrette, Best Actor for Michael Johnston, supporting bids including Andy Richter, plus editing, cinematography, score, sound, makeup, production design, and casting. The whole cast and crew will take part in the campaign.
The numbers behind the swagger are the story of the year. Barker, who is 26 and whose previous credit was the found-footage experiment Milk & Serial, made Obsession for $750,000. It has now passed $400 million worldwide and kept going — SlashFilm puts the total past $505 million — and for a stretch it ranked as the most profitable film ever made relative to budget.
The plot is a wish-gone-wrong fable: shy Bear uses a cheap wishing stick to make his best friend Nikki (Navarrette) fall in love with him, and it works — except what's animating Nikki is no longer Nikki. The abusive turn the "relationship" takes, and Bear's initial choice to do nothing about it, is what elevated the film from scare-delivery machine to the thing people argue about in parking lots.
Does a horror movie actually have a shot?
History says the ceiling exists but is high. The Exorcist earned ten nominations in 1974, Get Out won Jordan Peele the Original Screenplay Oscar with four nominations, and The Substance took five nominations and a win just two ceremonies ago. The Academy no longer reflexively ignores the genre; it ignores the genre's usual price bracket.
Navarrette is the most plausible beneficiary. Best Actress has become the category most open to horror — Demi Moore got there, and the campaign is framing Navarrette's double duty as Nikki-possessed and Nikki-trapped as exactly that kind of showcase. It isn't hurting her year that she was just cast as Rogue in the upcoming X-Men film.
Fifteen categories is every category Obsession can legally enter. Focus isn't predicting 15 nominations; it's refusing to concede a single one in advance.
The asterisk the campaign would rather skip
One line in the coverage sits uneasily under the confetti: art director Sally Choi has said publicly, on Instagram, that she was underpaid for her work on the film. A $750,000 budget means everyone worked cheap — that's the romance of the story until the movie clears half a billion and the credits start comparing notes. Barker's follow-up, the horror comedy Anything But Ghosts, is set in the same universe and reportedly budgeted at $5 million, which suggests at least the line items are growing with the legend. Nomination morning is January 21, 2027; the parking-lot arguments should hold until then.
Previously we wrote: Why Tom and Jerry: Forbidden Compass is so bad? It opened at 0%