Awards campaigns usually involve a publicist, a screening circuit, and a very tired actor smiling through junkets. This one involved a dog and a paw print. In October 2025, the indie distributor behind the horror film Good Boy sent the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences an open letter “written” by Indy, the movie’s four-legged star, asking to be considered for Best Actor. The stunt was a joke. The performance underneath it is not.
Here is the thing that makes the gag land: Indy really does carry the movie. Good Boy is told almost entirely from a dog’s point of view, and it works because the dog on screen is doing the acting a human lead usually would.
The campaign, briefly
The letter, first reported by Variety, has Indy protesting that he was ruled ineligible for the acting categories despite his “critically acclaimed role,” and asking the Academy to stop overlooking animal performers. He signed it with a paw print. It is silly and self-aware, exactly the kind of thing a small distributor does to get a small movie noticed during a crowded fall season.
And it worked, partly because the movie had numbers to back up the noise. Good Boy opened to about $2.2 million, one of the best debuts the distributor had ever posted, and landed a 90 percent critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes. A dog-led horror film is a hard sell on paper. This one earned its attention.
Animals, for the record, have never had an Oscars category of their own, though there is real precedent for honoring them elsewhere: Cannes hands out the Palm Dog every year, and canine performers like the Border Collie from Anatomy of a Fall have become festival celebrities in their own right. So Indy’s “campaign” is a bit, but it is a bit pointing at a genuine gap.
Why the performance holds up
Good Boy, directed by Ben Leonberg, follows Indy as he moves with his seriously ill owner into a grandfather’s old country house and slowly realizes something is wrong with the place. The camera lives at Indy’s height. There is almost no dialogue. The film asks the dog to communicate dread, confusion, grief, and love using body language alone, and it commits so hard to the premise that the owner’s face is kept off screen for nearly the entire runtime. The story we are grounded in is the dog’s, not the human’s.
That choice is the whole movie. Deny the audience a person’s expression to latch onto, and the only face left to read is the dog’s, his ears, his stillness, the way he fixes on an empty corner. It is a bet that a dog can hold the emotional center of a film, and the bet pays off.
Leonberg has said the movie leans directly into a trope every dog owner knows, the dog who stares at nothing, or fixates on the basement, or distrusts the weird neighbor. In most horror movies, that dog is a throwaway, gone before the first act ends. Good Boy takes that same dog and makes him the hero who survives to the end.
The scene that says more than it seems
One sequence is worth flagging because it does something quietly smart. Indy, frightened, is being comforted by his owner when he feels a slick, shadowy presence slide down his face and lashes out at it, only for the film to reveal he has actually bitten his owner’s hand. It plays like a classic horror fake-out. It also reads as a small, accurate lesson in dog behavior: a scared animal, giving off early warning signs, snapping when a frightening moment overwhelms him. Real dogs escalate the same way when their earlier signals go unread, and it is easy for an owner to focus on the bite rather than the fear that caused it.
The film’s recurring black ooze works as a stand-in for the owner’s illness, which nods at something owners find genuinely eerie in real life: dogs really can pick up on sickness, and there is ongoing research into their ability to detect certain cancers by smell. You can read Good Boy as a straight ghost story or as a movie about a dog watching his person fade. Both readings are there.
Does the dog make it?
People have been Googling this since the trailer dropped, and the answer, mild spoiler, is yes. Indy survives, shares a real goodbye with his owner, and goes home with the owner’s sister. For a genre that treats dogs as disposable, that alone feels like a small act of mercy, and a big part of why the movie connected.
Whether or not any dog ever gets an Oscar, Good Boy makes the sincere case behind the joke: give an animal performer the center of the frame, direct around what a dog can actually do, and you get a lead worth campaigning for.
