Do comedies get enough consideration at Oscars?

It is more than just a quirk of the calendar that the Glasgow Film Festival coincides with the Academy Awards.

The Scottish celebration of cinema traditionally wrap up just as the Oscars are getting underway and there has been much more interest from Glasgow, of course, with the adaptation of the late Alasdair Gray’s novel Poor Things landing a whopping 11 nominations and winning four Academy Awards.

Thousands of words have been written in Scotland about the rights and wrongs of director Yorgos Lanthimos’ version of Gray’s 1992 novel, particularly his relocation of the author’s story from Glasgow to London. There has been a lot less focus on how Poor Things has been so difficult to classify. But seeing an early preview left me in no doubt it was a comedy – albeit a sex , gothic and a science-fiction comedy all wrapped into one.

While Emma Stone was one of the big Academy Award winners, Poor Things losing out to Oppenheimer in the best picture category does revive the question of whether the odds are stacked against comedy at the Oscars.

My initial thought is the Oscars are too po-faced to be interested enough in comedy. But closer inspection of the best picture winners from the past 25 years suggests a slightly different story. Shakespeare in Love, American beauty, the Artist, Birdman and last year’s winner – Everything Everywhere All at Once – have enough comedy elements for them to count for me. It is musicals that have really struggled to make an impact since Chicago’s success 22 years ago.