In order to pad its already voluminous runtime and find an excuse to trot out Taylor Lautner and Kristen Stewart in a shameless act of pandering to the devoted Twihard audience, The Academy Awards featured an incredibly half-assed and unsubtle montage of horror movie moments that ranged from iconic (the shower scene from Psycho) to head-scratching (the remake of The Blob, but not the vastly superior original). It was like being hit with a hammer, so in that sense, I suppose it was a success.
If you’re serious about giving a nod to the genre, perhaps making the tribute a bit more like a horror film structurally would have been a good idea. A slow and atmospheric burn up until the final minute or 45 seconds, which I’d have made into a nonstop cascade of violence, ending with Michael Myers getting shot at the end of Halloween. I’d also have included more foreign horror and recognized the horror work of some Oscar winning filmmakers (like, oh, I don’t know – Kathryn Bigelow, James Cameron and Peter Jackson spring to mind). And, I’d have included Shadow of the Vampire.
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Think Twilight was included because the acting/writing is so bad it’s horrifying? That’s my bet.
The montage seemed to be less constructed to represent the best of the genre, but the most popular. And I think the Twilight kids were bold in the decision to sell the horror by acting as sonombalistic (sic) creatures forced to deliver their lines against their will.