I’ve thought long and hard about the Academy Award nominations that came out this morning, and here’s what I’ve concluded: I saw nowhere near enough films this past year. Sure, I probably saw most of the nominees, and there were some that I purposely avoided, but it still simply wasn’t enough. I can admit that, I’m a big enough person.
Can I ask — and I know that I’m not the only one who wants to know this — why must the vast majority of these films come out at the end of the year? Is the assumption that voters are truly too stupid to remember in January and February a great movie that they saw the previous summer? Really? And, let’s face it, if the movie was truly a great movie and stood out, it should be memorable eight months later. It should actually be memorable eight years later, and hopefully 80 years later, too. If it’s something that you’re going to shudder thinking about ten years down the line then it didn’t deserve to be nominated to begin with, did it?
I’m not going to do anything as trite as to recommend an overhaul of the way movies are nominated and then selected as a winner, but that doesn’t mean that the process is without problems either. A recent opinion piece in Entertainment Weekly lamented the fact that the Academy Awards occur earlier in the year than they used to, and suggested that it was possible that voters wouldn’t vote for the best pictures, because they simply wouldn’t have time to see them all. It went on to suggest that it is entirely possible that voters wouldn’t bother with longer films like The Good Shepherd at all simply due to the time crunch.
Wow. Those people shouldn’t be voting then, should they? And, again, maybe if the “best” movies were released throughout the year rather than just at the end of it, everyone involved would have more of a chance to see them. I know, that’s probably sacrilege, but just because it’s sacrilegious doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea.
Article comments
1 - handyguy
Part of the reason studios load all their prestige, award-bait movies from October to December is that they don't trust those films to make money. The review and award attention that they get is the main chance some of these films will have to succeed in the marketplace. 'Grown-up' movies really don't tend to do well in the summer, and there really is a chance Academy members won't remember to include on their nominating ballots movies released more than 6 months ago. Studios don't want to risk having their prize candidates ignored.
(Little Miss Sunshine may not be a valid example...it's a fizzy [some might even say dumb] comedy, perfect for summer, and the $60 million it reaped at the box office, good for an indie, wouldn't pay the ad budget on many studio films.)
And it probably is true that Academy members tend to vote for the movies they've seen most recently, including end-of-year releases, and, more likely, whichever screening copies they've gotten around to watching on DVD. They're only human. And it's not likely any of them will be disqualified from voting because they're too busy or have lazy film-watching habits.
Now if only they'd stop honoring pretentious stuff like Babel, while relegating Children of Men and United 93 to secondary categories.
2 - Baronius
Maybe individual movies will find success after recieving nominations, making it more lucrative to hold off their release until December.
But it's got to be detrimental to the industry as a whole when no one's seen the nominated films. There's less excitement about the Oscars, which will translate into less excitement about movies. This is the same argument people make for nominating more commercial movies, but that's another subject.
Anyway, I really think that a movie like Little Miss Sunshine will experience a rental boost equivalent to anything Notes on a Scandal might get in the theatres.