How ‘Mad Max: Fury Road' became an unlikely Oscar contender 10 years ago

Yahoo

18-05-2025

In the 10 years since Mad Max: Fury Road hit theaters, director George Miller's fourth outing in his post-apocalyptic franchise has become universally acclaimed as one of the greatest action movies ever made. Industry bodies like the Academy Awards do not usually celebrate action movies, so momentum has been building for years to create a new category honoring stunt performances. But even before Best Stunt Design finally becomes an official category starting with the 100th ceremony in 2028, Fury Road managed to score six Oscars from 10 nominations, making it the most-nominated film of its year, and still the record-holder for Australian movies at the Oscars. How did that unexpected paradox happen?
Don't ask Miller; praise from the Oscars was the last thing he expected of his long-gestating franchise revival, and he remained befuddled by it for a long time.
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'Who would have thunk it?' Miller told New York Times award columnist Cara Buckley in January 2016, shortly after the nominations were announced. 'The film was like last year, May, and I did not imagine I'd be back here talking about it, which is fine, you know, which is good. When you're in these awards seasons, and people have responded to the film in a positive way, then you say, 'OK, I'll enjoy the party as long as it lasts.''
As he references in that quote, Miller was not a stranger to the Oscars by 2016. Although best known for Mad Max, Miller has also made several movies not based on high-octane action or desert warlords wearing spikes and Speedos. He was nominated for Best Original Screenplay for 1992's Lorenzo's Oil, and for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay for 1995's Babe (which he produced but did not direct). He even won Best Animated Feature for 2006's penguin musical Happy Feet.
But until Fury Road, the Mad Max movies had gone unrecognized by the Oscars, and Miller didn't expect that to change.
'I used to joke in the cutting room, 'If we don't win an Oscar for this…' But I was kidding around!' Fury Road editor (and Miller's wife) Margaret Sixel told Kyle Buchanan in Blood, Sweat, and Chrome, a book-length oral history of the film. 'George would say, 'No, Margie, this kind of stuff is not Oscar stuff.' He dampened all our expectations.'
What changed? The easiest way to say it is that Miller and his many collaborators made a masterpiece. Despite its relatively straightforward construction (the movie is basically one big car chase, there and back), Fury Road is filled with colorful characters and detailed world-building that feels outlandish and resonates with real-world oppression. Fury Road made money in theaters, but in a year dominated by other, even flashier franchise revivals like Jurassic World and Star Wars: The Force Awakens, it didn't even crack the top 20 of Hollywood's domestic box office rankings for 2015. Yet almost everyone who did see it raved about it — not just critics and fans, but also awards insiders like Gold Derby's own Zach Laws.
'If ever there was an audience crowd-pleaser that deserved to be nominated, it's George Miller's bold, imaginative Mad Max: Fury Road, a revitalization of this Australian auteur's post-apocalyptic trilogy,' Laws wrote on this very site following the film's May 15-17 opening weekend in the United States. At that early stage, Laws correctly predicted that Fury Road would win Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing, Best Makeup and Hairstyling, Best Production Design, and Best Film Editing (proving that Sixel had been right all along). But he also advocated that the film should break through in the top categories of Best Director ('at age 70, [Miller] delivered the kind of nuts-and-bolts entertainment that makes the rest of the summer slate look like child's play') and Best Picture ('the film is not only a great entertainment, but a work of art').
Momentum kept building over the following months. According to Blood, Sweat, and Chrome, a decisive turning point came at the end of the year when Fury Road earned Best Picture from the prestigious National Board of Review.
'That NBR win gave the green light to anyone who was hedging in the critics' groups to be like, 'Yeah, I can vote for this,'' journalist Gregory Ellwood told Buchanan.
Sure enough, Fury Road soon earned Best Director and other honors from the Los Angeles and Chicago Film Critics Associations. Then came the 10 Oscar nominations, often when an unconventional competitor maxes out, but Fury Road was actually competing, even for the top categories. In Entertainment Weekly's anonymous Oscar ballot that year, an anonymous 'Oscar-winning actress' advocated for it to win Best Picture ('this movie was the most engaging on every level. It's a great example of why I want to go to the movies — to be completely absorbed in a fictitious world. And I loved that there were so many women in the movie'). At the same time, 'an Academy Award-winning screenwriter specializing in high-stakes drama' pushed Miller for Best Director, saying Fury Road 'had more cinematic gusto than just about all the others put together.'
Ultimately, neither of the big ones materialized. Best Picture went to the underdog drama Spotlight (which only won one other award, Best Original Screenplay). The Revenant filmmaker Alejandro J. Iñárritu received his second consecutive Best Director award. Was awarding Iñárritu back-to-back worth missing a singular opportunity to honor Miller for a movie that is much more remembered and celebrated a decade later? Oscar voters certainly seemed to think so; two other anonymous Academy members polled by EW back then praised how Iñárritu 'turned the difficulty of the location and the story into a cinematic spectacle' and 'introduced us to a visual world that we've never seen before.'
Ah, well. No one's written a book-length oral history of The Revenant, and Miller himself was just happy for his collaborators who did win — who also thanked him in all of their acceptance speeches.
'We were disappointed that George didn't win, but basically, they were all his awards in a way,' Sixel said.
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