THB #489: Oscargasm - Oscar’s 10 Commandments (Pt 1)

4 Weeks To Oscar

Oppenheimer looks like it is about to break the most consistent rule of the Best Picture Expansion Era… winning in spite of being one of the top 2 grossers amongst the nominees and winning Best Picture. This is the 15th Oscar season of The Expansion and it has never happened yet.

The Hurt Locker - #8 domestic grosser of 10 nominees
The King’s Speech - #4 of 10
The Artist - #6 of 9
Argo - #4 of 9
12 Years A Slave - #5 of 9
Birdman - #5 of 8
Spotlight - #6 of 8
Moonlight - #8 of 9 (#9 of 9 before the win)
The Shape of Water - #4 of 9
Green Book - #4 of 8
Parasite - #6 of 9
Nomadland - #3 of 8
CODA - not applicable with no reported box office
Everything Everywhere All at Once - #4 of 10

As you can see, the closest a Best Picture has gotten to the top is #3 in the distended season in which Nomadland won and no nominee grossed as much as $7 million.

This year’s line-up at the box office (without the one Streaming-Only nominee, Maestro) is currently…

Interestingly, Barbie being the #1 box office movie of the year being nominated is not really a rarity. This is the 6th time in 15 years that the #1 box office movie of the year has been nominated. It just hasn’t won. (The last #1 grosser - domestic and worldwide - to win Best Picture was Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, released in 2003.)

So… in honor of what now seems sure to be a breakthrough moment for massive box office hits at the Oscar ceremony (ha ha), I thought it would be a good time to offer up The 10 Rules Of Oscar, which I cleverly call Oscar’s 10 Commandments in the headline for clickbait purposes.

The 10 Rules Of Oscar

10. Going wire-to-wire is almost impossible.

It’s an interesting thing to discuss going wire-to-wire. Some percentage of people KNEW that Movie X was going to win Best Picture from Day One. But did they really? Every season has a personality and memories change over time. There are people who thought The King’s Speech or The Artist or 12 Years A Slave were locks to win from the fall festivals on. But a lot of people did not. (The Slave team wasn’t sure it was even going to get nominated after one of the major festivals passed… and later changed its mind.) In the fog of COVID, Nomadland kinda floated out there as the frontrunner most of the way.

After the fall festivals, I almost always see what I call a default Best Picture winner… meaning that it can be taken down, but if no one does, it is most likely to win Best Picture. It’s not an insult to the movie. It’s a read of the political campaign. Spotlight was the classic Default Winner for me. Great movie… but not as flashy as the others. But all the flash didn’t build into consensus for movies as diverse as Mad Max, The Martian (winning Comedy at The Globes killed it), and The Revenant (lost the horse vote, big!)

The problem with going wire-to-wire is that voters get bored. DreamWorks still rages about Harvey Weinstein’s campaign, but the truth (in my opinion) of Saving Private Ryan’s loss is that the voters got bored. And while they might twist history to say otherwise, but the opening on the beach was, in reality, a very different movie experience than the rest of the movie. This was a feature, not a bug. It was a brilliant choice. But yes, it allowed the idea that the majority of the film was “conventional” to work against its Best Picture expectations. Voters picked the shiny new object. Ryan was released in July and Shakespeare didn’t go wide until February, about 2 weeks before final voting.

Lincoln, Gravity, The Imitation Game, La La Land, Black Panther/A Star Is Born, 1917… a brought to heel by the unexpected.

Thing is, you can usually feel the shift by this point in the season… and we’re not feeling it. I’ve called Oppenheimer - one of my top 3 films of the year - the Default Winner since the summer. It’s not that it doesn’t deserve it. It’s just held off all comers. And as I have written before, Universal slow played it through the season with great skill. They let is lie low… and have been reminding us that it is a landmark in so many ways since mid-January, avoiding frontrunner fatigue.

9. The first rule of Oscar Club is get your movie seen.

There is a massive amount of distractions during the Oscar season. But before you can get voters to vote for your candidate, in whatever category, you need to get them to see your movie.