Earlier this year, Anora, a chaotic, street-smart love story between a sex worker and the son of a Russian oligarch, won Best Picture. The Academy’s winners and nominees are not always sweeping, traditional romances, but they are unmistakably love stories: intimate, complicated, and emotionally rich.
The Oscars’ relationship with romance has never been especially loud or consistent, but it has quietly endured. Whether disguised as historical epics, political dramas, or genre experiments, love in all its forms has always found a way to the Oscar stage.
“The Oscars, it seems, are more comfortable honouring romance when it comes in disguise”
This past week, Celine Song’s Materialists premiered, a film that does not just tell a love story but deconstructs one. Following her Oscar nominated debut Past Lives, Song returns with a sharp, surprising film that begins as a glossy rom com before peeling back into something more cutting and philosophical. It is about dating, power, compatibility, and connection in the modern age. Romantic, absolutely, but jagged, disillusioned, and brutally honest.
While Materialists may not be a major Oscar contender beyond a possible nod for Original Screenplay, its arrival is a timely reminder of the Academy’s often subtle but enduring relationship with romance.
The Oscars have occasionally rewarded straightforward love stories, like the classic romantic comedies It Happened One Night, which swept the top five Oscars in 1934, and The Apartment, blending cynicism and tenderness to win Best Picture in 1960. However, more often the Academy honours romance when it is part of a broader story, such as a historical epic, a war drama, or a fantasy, where love is a central and driving force.
Epic films like Titanic combined disaster spectacle with a star-crossed romance to claim 11 Oscars, while Casablanca wove a tragic love story into the fabric of World War II. Similarly, Gone with the Wind, West Side Story, and more recently The Shape of Water all won Best Picture with romance deeply embedded within larger themes of conflict, social change, or fantasy.
Even Everything Everywhere All At Once, a film celebrated for its multiverse chaos and inventive storytelling, is at its core a love story. That thread of love quietly runs through one of the most acclaimed Best Picture winners in recent memory.
The Oscars, it seems, are more comfortable honouring romance when it comes in disguise, when love is the emotional anchor, not the headline.
In recent years, there has been a notable trend toward bittersweet love stories, ones that do not end in fulfilment. La La Land is perhaps the clearest example: dazzling and romantic, yet built around the idea that love does not always survive ambition. Past Lives, Song’s debut, captured a global audience with its tender meditation on paths not taken and earned Best Picture and Original Screenplay nominations despite being small, quiet, and emotionally restrained.
The Academy has often been ahead of the cultural curve in celebrating queer love stories. Moonlight made history as the first LGBTQ+ film to win Best Picture, not just a recognition but a resounding embrace. Brokeback Mountain and Call Me By Your Name both received widespread acclaim and major awards, helping bring queer romance into the mainstream through cinema. Even when films like Carol or The Favourite missed the top prize, their bold, emotionally rich portrayals were championed with multiple nominations. In many ways, the Oscars have long been willing, even eager, to honour love stories that challenge convention and expand the boundaries of what cinematic romance can look like.
If there is one category where love stories thrive most reliably, it is screenwriting. Her, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Call Me By Your Name, the Before trilogy, are all Oscar nominated or winning scripts that treat love not as formula but as emotional architecture. Romance may not always win the night, but on the page, it lingers.
Now, it feels like something new is emerging. Auteur driven romances, messy, mature, and emotionally complex, are making a confident comeback. Romance movies, including romcoms, are shedding their outdated reputation as “silly chick flicks” and stepping firmly into the realm of prestige drama. Films like Challengers, All of Us Strangers, and Past Lives are not just romantic dramas; they are serious cinema. Critics and audiences alike are taking them seriously. While not all secured final Oscar nominations, their presence in the conversation marks a meaningful shift.
Materialists fits squarely within this evolving landscape. Rather than an outlier, it signals a renewed interest in love stories that reflect the complexities of modern life.
There is something quietly hopeful about this development, even quietly romantic.
Binge. play. Watch. Repeat.
