Oscars 2019: Predicting The 10 Best Popular Films Nominees

Remember earlier this year, when the Oscars felt practically innovative for nominating one of the most successful horror films of the year, Jordan Peele's Get Out, for Best Picture and then actually giving the award to a strange little sci-fi monster flick about a woman who has sex with a gill-man, Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water?

Well, hope you appreciated that while it lasted. Because with this new category, audiences are all-but-guaranteed to see stranger genre films segregated out from the Best Picture lot and slotted into this new category instead. So the hopes of seeing Ari Aster's stellar directorial debut Hereditary get nominated for Best Picture just sank through the floor, but the hopes of seeing it nominated for Best Popular Film have never been higher.

Hereditary features captivating and masterful direction, an especially powerful script, and some of the best performances of the year from both Toni Collette and Alex Wolff. It's also a horror film that is flat-out traumatizing at times. On top of all of this, it's also one of A24's most successful theatrical releases ever, meaning that there is a solid chance of it meeting that Academy's as-yet-undefined definition of 'popular'.

Much like the expanded Best Picture category at the 2010 awards, the Academy will be looking to prove the value of this addition at next year's awards by showing how diverse their nominations here can be. So horror will almost certainly get a bit of love, and Hereditary is an easy bet to make.