Studios break the bank for awards
As the year draws to a close, the film industry begins to gear up for the madness of awards season. The films that studios believe to be their best chances at Academy Award gold will be strategically released in these last couple of months to keep them fresh in the minds of voters. It is unfortunate that awards can be greatly influenced by one film’s publicists outmaneuvering those of a different film. These awards should be based on the quality of the films, not on the quality of a PR campaign. This, unfortunately, is not the case.
Perhaps the most notable form of this maneuvering is the now famous — or perhaps infamous — “for your consideration” campaign, examples of which will soon fill the trade papers and spill out into newspapers and websites. The most famous instance of this was 1998’s advertising battle between Miramax’s Shakespeare in Love and Dreamworks’ Saving Private Ryan. Miramax’s flick managed to garner quite a bit of attention through its sheer volume and Shakespeare in Love eventually won the Oscar for Best Picture. Miramax’s advertising campaign for the star-studded film was rumored to cost $15 million for the Academy Award consideration campaign alone.
The practice has been around since the ’30s, or nearly as long as the Oscars have been in existence, albeit in a less pervasive degree. Now, however, many films will plaster their consideration ads without any restraint, not fearing the saturation that brought on such heavy criticism 15 years ago for Shakespeare because, frankly, everyone else is doing it, too.
What emerges here is a sort of advertising arms race, where any studio that doesn’t keep up runs the risk of their film falling into obscurity. Though tact used to be the name of the game, it is now a game of escalation, and no studio wants to be left behind. Subtlety has been thrown out the window, replaced by the attempt to garner the most favor with awards selection committees by having the greatest possible exposure.
The trade ads are coming very soon, but currently the maneuvering is more subtle. In comparison, Hayao Miyazaki’s last film The Wind Rises was just shown at the American Film Institute Festival for a week, even though its actual release date isn’t until February so that it qualifies for this year’s animated feature award. Martin Scorsese’s upcoming The Wolf of Wall Street was due to be released this weekend but the editing process took longer than expected. There was a frenzy in some corners as the film had been generating a good amount of awards buzz and if it got pushed past the end of 2013, it would have to wait through all of 2014 for eligibility for next year’s Oscars. Ultimately, Paramount pushed the film they intended to release on Christmas, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, until 2014 and put Wolf in its spot, avoiding the awards debacle.
When a film’s release is handled less expertly, the results can be quite embarrassing. The Palme d’Or-winning Blue is the Warmest Color was snubbed by the Academy Awards committee. The reason for this is not a controversial decision by the French selection committee to nominate a different film, but rather the film being released after the cutoff for the foreign film Oscar. By virtue of already having been released in the United States, however, it is eligible for all other Oscars in the awards ceremony and it could conceivably win an Oscar such as Best Adapted Screenplay and then win Best Foreign Film 12 months later. Some experts argue that winning at this year’s Oscars would disqualify it from winning the foreign film award a year later, but this situation has never arisen before, so no rule explicitly outlaws it. Considering the controversy with Blue, this is certainly not the biggest talking point surrounding the film. But a film of this quality being disqualified from the foreign film category because of a simple oversight such as this is very unfortunate.
The reality is these maneuverings are a very real and very essential part of the modern awards season. One can only hope that the films of the best quality also snag the most savvy publicists and the smartest marketers, in order to have campaigns and strategies that allow them to receive the recognition they deserve.
Daniel Grzywacz is a senior majoring in neuroscience. His column “The Reel Deal” runs Fridays.
Follow us on Twitter @dailytrojan