THB #676: 2 Weeks To Oscar

Now we’re down to it.

29 hours for Oscar voters to vote as I start writing this. 2 weeks until the big Sunday show. The Season of the Freak™ is almost over.

And the field has narrowed, yes.

But how much feels locked in, which is quite the norm by this moment in time most Oscar seasons? Not much.

Two other seasons that I covered closely come to mind.

In the 2000 Oscar race (Oscars, March 2001), I’m pretty sure that I am the only one left who remembers me booming on the E! Oscar Pre-Show (back when that was a real thing) that, “With God as my witness, Gladiator will not win Best Picture!” That one went sour about 5 hours later.

It was Gladiator, the 2 Soderbergh bangers (Traffic, Erin Brockovich), breakout foreign language smash Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and the still hard-to-believe Chocolat.

Opinions will vary, but arguably 4 legitimately excellent and significant films in cinema history. All but 1 had grossed over $100 million domestic. Soderbergh has done his version of the Spielberg double, which had been Schindler’s List and Jurassic Park in the same year. Still Sony Classics’ #1 grosser of all time, Crouching Tiger was Ang Lee’s 7th feature, but it was his commercial breakout and his first (and last) venture into Shaw Brothers territory, done with such subtle artistry and skill that it was a game-changer for American cinema, soon to be supplanted by Spider-Man and the explosion of CG. It also made an American movie star out of Michelle Yeoh and Chow Yun-Fat. And no one really took Chocolat seriously. (And we were all still sad because You Can Count On Me hadn’t taken that 5 spot... or at least Almost Famous.)

Of the Top 8 categories (Picture/Director/Actors/Writers), a Soderbergh film would take 4 of the 7 going into Best Picture. And Gladiator had only taken Best Actor with Russell Crowe. (Almost Famous and Pollock took the other 2.)

We will never know whether Soderbergh’s 2 films split the Best Picture vote. But the most box office popular film, Gladiator, won the night.

Next… 2006… The Departed wins best picture.

Very different scenario overall. Scorsese had been locked into finally-winning Best Director since October. The screenplay by William Monahan was also a front-runner.

But the competition was less muscular than in 2000. Little Miss Sunshine was seen as a potential upsetter. The Queen was solid, but kinda blew its wad in October when it was released, except for Helen Mirren, who was as much a lock as Scorsese since the film opened. Babel was the breakout for Alejandro González Iñárritu, but was a seriously challenging movie, which rarely leads to a win. And after the world seemed set for a massive season-owner with Flags of Our Fathers, the Eastwood film tanked and his masterful Japanese-language “other side” film, Letters From Iwo Jima, the last film of that season to be shown, filled in… and was never seen as a serious contender to win Best Picture.

Babel had won the Golden Globe, which people were still pretending mattered. Iñárritu had won Best Director at Cannes, but no one was unseating Scorsese. People saw The Queen as an easy choice, unchallenging and elegant, but a bit played out. The Departed was downgraded by some as being to happy to be as violent as it was and a lot of mentions of Nicholson’s porn-house dildo. And it was a remake of a Hong Kong smash hit... though that didn’t become a big talking point. People really loved Little Miss Sunshine. There was no denying it. But was this sweet little Searchlight film really a Best Picture movie?

An it turned out, not.

Academy voters, already locked on Scorsese, went to the biggest hit with the biggest stars, The Departed. The only non-Picture Oscar wins besides Scorsese were Adapted Screenplay and Editing. But those 4 wins turned out to be the biggest haul of the night, with Pan’s Labyrinth grabbing 3 although it was not nominated for Best Picture or Best Director. (Guillermo would get both 11 years later.)

You may notice that both of the example seasons were before the expansion to 10 films (or 8 or 9 in a couple seasons). The Expansion changed a lot about how the outcomes occurred.

There are various reasons for this.

First, it changed the field of Best Picture nominees considerably. The intention may have been to drawing more smash hit winners into the Best Picture race. But membership, for years before The Academy moved to more than double the size of its membership, turned out to chose smaller, “better” films to fill the new slots. There hace been some big hits that probably got in too. But very distinctly, a lot of movies that did a level of box office that in the past would have been - based on the history - disqualified them were suddenly in the race.

In the 30 seasons before The Expansion, only a couple of Best Picture Oscar winners were not 1 of the 2 highest grossers of the 5 nominees.

For 14 straight seasons of the 15 years of The Expansion, no film that was 1 of the 2 highest grossers - and one 1 at #3 - of the 8 - 10 nominees won Best Picture. Financial success had become a handicap. Voting for the biggest hits was posited as embarrassing.

And then, Oppenheimer. We will know whether that was a fluke or a trend in a few years.

I am not one of those who talks about the preferential voting system being decisive. I don’t see a single example of this really making itself apparent in the results. Is it possible that some title that was the beloved by only a quarter or a third of The Academy could have won in the first round of voting, never getting enough #2 or #3 votes to be on 50% of ballots? Possible… remotely. But the notion that a weak title that wasn’t at or near the very top in the first round won the day on mostly 2nd or 3rd round votes? I don’t see it.

The thing that is challenging about Oscar prognostication is that we never actually get data that fills in our many ideas of why things came out the way they did. All we have is the outcomes… 6 months a year getting to the outcome, trying to parse data from various places of the half-year… and all we get to work with by the end of it all is the very specific outcome. This leads to madness… especially if you are getting paid to offer your alleged insight. Especially in a season like this, which has not offered a clear path and really, still doesn’t. This doesn’t mean that what seems obvious won’t happen… nor that it will.

That’s why this is supposed to be fun.

Tee hee!

I happened to come around when the Oscar village started growing. And over the last 30 years, the little village, while less and less widely popular, grew into a bigger and bigger battle in town. From VHSes to DVDs to Streaming, the effort to reach voters accelerated. The trades evolved from drowsy family businesses to cash-creation machines under new ownership that could not care less about movies or journalism. The independent film movement in award season evolved from non-existent to hugely successful to bought out by The Majors to abandoned by all but a couple Majors to new the creation of powerhouse indies like A24 and Neon as well as Dependents Searchlight and Focus.

I love the movies. But the game has gotten stupid. In a weird coincidence of history, it is a bit like film criticism, which has fewer professional critics than ever, but more people who are considered critics than ever. A few years back, everyone needed their “awards person,” leading to a lot of fans who were active on social media to be given professional status by even the biggest outlets. Some got more professional. Most did not. And in order to keep these jobs - actual paying jobs, often with actual perks like travel and access - it is now incumbent on these people to fill column inches, even when they really have nothing worth saying.

Every “precursor” is life and death. Endless presumptions about what this means or that means. Nutty personifications of awards-giving groups… “The Academy thinks” or “BAFTA thinks"“ or the worst one, “Everyone thinks.” And no institutional memory, even of the season we are in. But very few do the work… they read something somewhere and repeat opinion like it is fact. And it spreads like wildfire because everyone needs to have an opinion about everything.

And when those lazily embraced opinions turn out to be wrong…. they just disappear like aging smoke. Nikki Finke brought us The Write-Over… the anti-journalistic tool to not only update the story, but to disappear your errors, large and small. And when The Penske Trades intentionally misreport the Globes ratings as being up when they are really down… more smoke. Poof. “It’s only award season.”

So… the game of Oscar is not as fun as it once was.

The more-than doubling of the Academy membership is what was meant to be an effort to expand membership for underrepresented groups within the community that was The Academy for 7 decades turned into a massive international expansion. The original intention… poof.

It’s not like The Academy could have done better with the original mission. The industry doors - especially in middle and upper management, on set and in studios and production companies - have been closed for too many decades. Things are improving slowly… but it’s slow. Real seeding, if it happens, will take at least a couple of decades to blossom.

So The Academy turned to the international cinema community and found a massive, deep well of established talent. I love this idea. But The Academy has not adjusted to its choice by making Oscar a more international event. The new members and, certainly, some of the veterans, have. But The Academy itself remains profoundly risk-averse. Changes are only really made to avoid discredit. This defensive position really started in the early 2000s when the annual Oscar viewership started dipping under 40 million and The Globes started clocking around 20 million. The closest this got before COVID was 2018, when the difference was less than 8 million viewers.

It’s gotten worse since then. The Academy dipped under 20 million viewers for the first time in modern history in 2021 and hasn’t gone over that landmark since. The Globes have been circling the toilet even more intensely and hasn’t been over 10 million viewers in the last 5 years.

It was only 11 years ago that The Oscars scored 43.7 million viewers. 12 Years A Slave won. Hits Gravity and The Wolf of Wall Street were in the BP race. But plenty of small films… nothing all that different than this year’s race. But the audience is less than half the size. And 15 awards handed out instead of 23 is not going to change that fate.

Change is hard. Keeping up with the culture is a real challenge.

Look at movie theaters. Ignorant, disinterested faux-journalists claim the delivery system is dying. But they fail repeatedly to work to understand what is happening. The hottest commodity since COVID is Premium Screens… which people are paying more to go to attend. The audience has not actually been “most people” for decades already. But the minority that is willing is willing to pay more for the best experience. They are still going to “smaller” movies, but the media only writes about that middle, that makes up a third or more of the box office. when there are standout exceptions. There are all kinds of things that can be improved about the theatrical experience… but it will not take the number of people who attend more than 10 times a year from the low teens by percentage to 35%. Can’t happen. And that is okay. We left the “one revenue source” world in this business - for tv too - 40+ years ago. Catch up!

Wait… this is an Oscar column…

Nevermind…

I’m not going to tell you what I think you should vote for. If you were so easily persuaded, you wouldn’t be reading me… certainly not this far into this column today.

Momentum would suggest Anora. As you can see, it’s won everything between January and yesterday. (SAG, ASC, and ACE are still coming, all after Oscar voting ends.)

But momentum has been all screwed up this season. That doesn’t mean that the DGA and PGA are meaningless. It just means that while “precursors” are often misleading, reflective not predictive, this could be even more the case in this season of fire affecting 40% or so of the Academy voters and throwing off the schedule and priority of the season and of Trump’s reelection. Does Israel/Palestine still matter? Seemingly for a smaller percentage of the voters than it threatened to in the fall… but it might help or hurt The Brutalist with 200 or 300 voters, which could make a difference in the end.

How much does the Emilia Pérez vote get moved by all the drama? Good question. We don’t know. It does seem to clearly make it all the less likely to win Best Picture. But could it still win Foreign Language? Can Zoe Saldaña still win? That is the buzz around. But nothing really assures us that it would have won those awards - or not won them - without the distraction.

It is, of course, worth taking into consideration that the non-Best Picture field seems pretty spread out. Kieran Culkin seems to be the lock for Supporting Actor for the non-BP-nom’ed A Real Pain… which also seems as likely as not the Orignal Screenplay winner.

Do you have Demi Moore as Best Actress… or Mikey Madison… or even Fernanda Torres?

Chalamet is still waiting for his first win. Brody keeps beating him.

Are Baker and Corbet the only ones who could really win Best Director?

When one argues that “anything could happen,” and one looks at the record of the season and sees that “anything” hasn’t happened, it kinda kicks the energy out of anyone that isn’t Anora at this point.

If Anora wins, that will be the 2nd win by Neon in 6 seasons.

If either Anora or The Brutalist wins Best Picture, that would mean that in the last 6 seasons, 4 of the winners were true indies (2 Neon, 1 A24, 1 Apple). Universal would be the only Major to win best Picture in 11, then 12, years.

Big change.

But the only inevitability is change. And there will me more to come.

And in 25 hours (as I finish writing this), we will be on to the next season, with only a few details left to uncover.

Until tomorrow…