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.