The greatest lesson of this *Oscar season is... how little imagination is now brought to Oscar season.
There are literally hundreds of very smart people focused on the season for distributors, every one trying to figure out the next great thing to do, the key to opening the hearts and minds of The 10,000.
Since the great John Boorman turned to sending out VHSes at his own expense in 1985 to get attention to The Emerald Forest, we have had screeners. Harvey Weinstein used his marketing genius (and that of his remarkable team who still dominate awards consulting to this day) to turn VHS and then DVD into a ubiquitous tool of success in the season.
The absolute mantra of Oscar season was, "Get them to see the movie." How a movie played on the big screen and how it played on your TV were the point of deviation. And Home Entertainment offered a better chance to grab eyeballs than to get voters out to their twentieth film in a screening room in a month.
Then access to talent became The Tool of …
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