Oscars, Oscars: Comments on Award Hype and the Status of the Awards Show

Last time at The Vault, I posed the idea that current Oscar hype is unnecessarily overwhelming. Given 24-hour news services, we are inundated with constant updates on the smallest tidbit of information that could affect who is in the lead in the race to secure an Oscar nomination. These updates are often superficial, sometimes including analysis of movies that have not even come out yet. But, as reader Teddy Riley points out in his comment on that post, not all Oscar coverage is necessarily bad. Looking at promising upcoming films is a good way to alert movie audiences of films that might otherwise slip under the radar. There is a fine line, however, between critically parsing a film's components to look for Oscar worthiness and bestowing an Oscar crown just because the plot and the lead actor sound like they fit the Oscar formula. I went out into the world wide web in hopes of finding Oscar predictions that can be examples of the better ways to handle our innate desire to choose the winner of any competition--even if the contest is still five months off. I found what I was looking for at Cinemablend.com, where Katey Rich recently wrote her thoughts about current contenders for the Oscar race in her post "Oscar Prediction Mania 09: Let the Games Begin!" What sounds like another superficial post based on little more than hype is actually a thoughtful, well-put-together look at films who may be Oscar contenders, based on word from previews at film festivals and Ms. Rich's own viewing of films that have actually been released. On top of looking for decent analysis of the Oscar race, I also looked at responses to the recent announcement of who will produce the upcoming 2009 Oscars, namely Laurence Mark (right side of picture) and Bill Condon (left side), who respectively produced and directed Dreamgirls. This announcement has created a flurry of debate in the blogosphere and elsewhere on the state of the Academy Awards Ceremony itself, comments that are summed up nicely in a post entitled "Can the Oscars Be Saved?" by Patrick Goldstein of The Big Picture, a blog that is featured on the Los Angeles Times's website. For ease, I have posted my comments down below, as well as the links where you can find the original article and comment.

"Oscar Prediction Mania 09: Let the Games Begin!" by Katey Rich
Comment:
Ms. Rich, thank you for your detailed thoughts about the Oscar race! I particularly like that you have managed to separate yourself from the superficial hype that many pundits engage in when covering the Academy Awards and instead ground yourself in films that have already been released, either in film festivals or to the general public. After all, if the film has not been released yet (or as you mention, even completed yet!) how can one make a genuine claim about its Oscar chances? On that note, you mentioned that with so many Oscar potential films being released in December, some are bound to "get lost in the shuffle." Do you think that this will lead to a new look at marketing strategies as films try to stand out among the myriad of Oscar hopefuls? For instance, the marketing department at Warner Bros. seems to be pulling out all the stops in their attempts to get The Dark Knight recognized, re-releasing it in January and offering free Blu-ray copies of the film to Academy voters. Do you think other studios will start looking at employing similar tactics, or is this something they are already doing? On a similar note, I'm interested in your prediction that The Dark Knight will increase Oscar viewership during the upcoming Awards ceremony. Do you think there is a chance that the lengthy coverage of Heath Ledger's Oscar chances will burn out potential audience members by the time the Academy Awards rolls around in February 2009? While I agree that people are attracted to rooting for films they've actually seen, there may be a chance that some people will be numb to Ledger Oscar talk since it has been on everyone's minds since his untimely death. It will be interesting to see if The Dark Knight does indeed have the effect you predict. Given how the Oscars have become such a slow, dragged-out affair, I remain doubtful that even The Dark Knight can pull its ratings out of the mire. Many of those who root for its success may be satisfied finding updates online instead of wading through the ceremony itself.

"Can the Oscars Be Saved?" by Patrick Goldstein
Comment:
This is an excellent look at the reactions to the appointment of Mr. Mark and Mr. Condon! It is helpful to have a compilation of the various views on the state of the Academy Awards so that they can be compared easily. You also have some interesting ideas about how to fix the Oscars. I am intrigued about your suggestion to split the technical awards off from the main awards ceremony. This would certainly have the benefit of shortening the main broadcast, as well as reducing it to the awards that viewers care the most about, such as Best Picture and the various Best Acting categories. But conversely, since the technical categories are the ones that people are the least interested in, is there any guarantee that anyone will watch them if they have their own awards show? True, the younger generation may be more attracted to categories having to do with special effects and the like. And, as you suggest, it might be a good place to experiment with new, more effective ways of handling the ceremony. I feel, however, that such an awards ceremony will be much less of a draw than the current incarnation of the Academy Awards and would not be a successful endeavor. Indeed, I am not sure that there is any real way to fix the Oscars. It is already a dragged-out affair. The skits, musical numbers and tributes do serve to break up the monotony from the slew of presenters handing out the awards. Unfortunately, this also lengthens the proceedings, creating the need for more distracting gimmicks, creating a vicious circle in an attempt to balance length with entertainment. The shortest way to handle the affair would be to cut the films down to just handing out the awards, but this obviously would be an extreme solution. Other than splitting the technical awards off from the show, do you have other suggestions for how to improve the Academy Awards? What changes should be made for the 2009 ceremony? Besides better-staged musical numbers, is there anything else you hope that Mr. Mark and Mr. Condon will bring to the show?

Buzzed Out: The Overdone Coverage of the Oscar Race

In a world of mass media, pundits predict award winners like they pick derby winners, while business gurus sit back and rake in the profit. Sound like a bad movie plot? You would not be far off. While the above may be a bit of an exaggeration, it is what the coverage of the Academy Awards has become. Commonly known as the Oscars, these awards are a way to recognize excellence in film. But while this remains true, the mass media has turned the Awards into a race blown out of proportion, something to be tracked and commentated on avidly, where predicting the correct winner is a cold calculation that has little to do with the individual merits of a film. Silently encouraging this disproportionate enthusiasm are the movie studios, who know that Oscar talk is a golden ticket to bigger profits.

The main culprit responsible for this inundation of awards coverage is none other than the mass media itself. With the rise of 24-hour news mediums, entertainment news outlets are pressed to fill their minutes and hours with any story they can find. And what better provides material than a long, extended race? This formula has already proven itself for political news media in the shape of the 2008 presidential election. For months, America has had daily reports, like this one by CNN, on the latest election polls, with analysis of every minute shift in the percentages. With a new poll every day, pundits are guaranteed to have at least one thing to talk about in their columns and television broadcasts. Entertainment news mediums unsurprisingly have duplicated this approach when handling the road to the Academy Awards. Everything from trailers to interviews is game to be analyzed for Oscar potential.

The handling of the coverage of The Dark Knight is one of the biggest examples of awards buzz gone wild. Rumors began as early as March that Heath Ledger was in the running for a posthumous Oscar for his portrayal of the Joker in The Dark Knight; as the film's release date approached, the number of articles seemed to increase exponentially. Now Warner Bros. has announced a re-release of the film in January, the time when Oscar nominations are made and votes are cast, undoubtedly in a last push to garner awards. If Ledger is successfully nominated for Best Actor, America will have had a full year of speculation and debate about the likelihood of his winning an Oscar. Undoubtedly, speculation about Ledger's prospects increased in part because of his death and in part because of his genuinely impressive performance. But the year-long coverage of his prospects is an overload and just one symptom of a culture dominated by mass media.

The biggest sign of how out of hand the Oscar coverage has come to be is not the daily columns dedicated to the subject, but the websites tracking probabilities of nominations and wins like bookies calculating the spread on a football game. A prime example is the website In Contention which takes Oscar tracking to an extreme. In Contention features a detailed set of predictions about the final composition of the nominations list. These predictions are not limited to the usual categories of Best Picture or Best Actor, but extend to such obscure categories as Sound Mixing and Art Direction. The vast majority of these films have not even been released yet. The image to the left shows their predictions for Art Direction, containing only one film that has shown in theatres. How anyone can claim to know that the sound mixing for Defiance is Oscar worthy before seeing (and hearing) the film seems to defy comprehension. Those who run this website have an idea of what kind of superficial components an award-winning film should have and seem to make their predictions on that basis alone. If predictions are to be made at all about who will win an Oscar, it should be made after a film is released and viewed, not before. For those who think that In Contention is merely an unusual case in the vast consortium that is the Internet, I invite them to take a look at Buzzmeter, a feature to be found in the Los Angeles Times's website. Like In Contention, this site tracks "who's hot and who's not in key awards races." This description is not the language of a website that is looking at the merits of a film, but of a website that is keeping a popularity poll.

But the media alone is not responsible for the continuous Oscar talk. The movie studios themselves have a vested interest in keeping the "buzz" alive, driven by what every corporation at heart is driven by: the need to make money. It is doubtful that a studio is troubled that people who have yet to see their picture are predicting it will be nominated for an Academy Award. And being nominated for, let alone winning, one of the more prestigious Oscars is a sure way to increase the profit margin.

Box Office Mojo, run by movie analyst Brandon Gray, provides the data to validate this claim. Michael Clayton, nominated for Best Picture of 2007, earned $55,000 the weekend before its nomination (Jan. 18-21) and over two million dollars the weekend following its nomination (Jan. 25-27), as we can see in the data table to the right. All Best Picture nominees for the 2007 Oscars show similar, if not as drastic, boosts in their weekend grosses following their nominations. Audiences are drawn to Oscar-nominated films because they want to see what all the fuss is about. With this monetary incentive, one can easily see why studios would like to bolster any discussion of their film's chances for an Oscar, even if it is only July.

The coverage of the Academy Awards has grown into a unwieldy creature that detracts from the value of the films that are under consideration. Admittedly, much of the coverage of any aspect of the entertainment world is somewhat superficial, focusing on the glitz and the glamor of a world that revolves around publicity. But many of the films that are nominated for an Academy Award have real merits which should be considered as the voting for the coveted Oscar commences. Quite a bit, though not all, of the media's analysis of Oscar films focuses on if the films fit the model of what an Oscar winner is, rather than an actual critical analysis of the components of a film. Unfortunately, this trend is not likely to end anytime soon. Our culture is one that thrives on the latest gossip and rumors swirling around Tinsel Town, and the latest whispered aside on a film's chances for the golden statue is just one more tidbit that people are ready to jump on. In the meantime, we will have to continue living through this rather bad movie plot until someone comes up with a better script.