The old days of Oscar watching made it much easier for a contender to sneak by the Alien without being detected and then attacked. The old days enabled formidable studio Oscar bait to live out its intended trajectory to win Best Picture. It was managed by competitive publicists who had direct access to Academy voters. They didn’t have to contend with the gauntlet. There were just a few of them presenting their ads to voters. Voters would see the movies the studios were promoting for Best Picture and they would either agree with their submissions or not. The critics shaped the dialogue to some extent but their job was still different from the job of Oscar voters. There was a clear distinction between what the critics liked and what Oscar voters thought represented the best of their industry.
Back then, in 1999 and earlier, Roger Ebert, Kenneth Turan, Dave Karger and a few other media reporters put out their annual Oscar predictions. They did this pretty close to when the winners would be announced. I don’t recall many outlets speculating on what might be the nominees. That was the Academy’s job. Entertainment Weekly, I believe, did do Oscar nomination predictions but you will be hard pressed to find them archived online going back much further than 1998. When I started in 1999 everything was changing fast.
Now, predicting the nominees is an industry unto itself. Before my site, no one was really comparing the precursors to the Academy, not even the DGA, certainly not the newly formed PGA or SAG, not the New York, Los Angeles or National Society of Film Critics. Comparing them eventually led to influencing them. Whether these groups are voting based on how they want Oscar to vote, or if they’re voting how they think Oscar will vote, either way it is very difficult to separate the big industry unions from the Oscars.
The Oscar industry grew because studios began taking their advertising prospects away from exclusively the Hollywood Reporter and Variety to independent sites, namely David Poland’s Movie City News. From there, many of studios advertised regularly with the independent sites. Once the money started rolling in, the big media sites adopted the policy of Oscar blogging – that is, reporting on the race regularly, not just in the few weeks leading up to the Oscars. The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Huffington Post, USA Today all got into the Oscar blogging game.
Read: Archived story about Oscar campaigning from 1992 by Inside Oscar’s Damien Bona and Mason Wiley, also Hollywood-Elsewhere’s Jeff Wells.
Two major shifts happened to bring us to the point where we are now. 1) Oscar pushed back its date by one month, moving the Oscars from March to February to capitalize on sweeps week. That did more to ruin the Oscars as we used to know them than anything else has, even Oscar bloggers. 2) Hollywood itself changed. They looked at the box office returns coming out of China and South Korea and they thought, holy shit. If we’re looking to make money, we should make more movies that the ticket buyers in those countries like. Well, so what does that mean? Fewer “adult” films, more tent poles. As Hollywood shifts its focus, the Oscar industry has become the last bastion of “real movie” survival.
The Oscar industry helps films at the box office whether they end up being liked by voters or not. Most Academy members (and old school publicists) will tell you they don’t pay attention to the “noise.” And I’d be more willing to buy that if we weren’t so good at figuring out what they might pick. The reason we’re good at it is because a consensus vote is like the Titanic headed for the iceberg. It can’t be turned around in time to miss the iceberg. It’s too big and too heavy by that point. You can try to slow it down but best to brace for landing. Once it’s set in motion that’s pretty much it.
Read: First Entertainment Weekly Oscar odds article from back in 1990.
So how do we build our Titanic? How do we get to a consensus? These days, the movie has to be good. How do we know it’s good? It’s been seen and reviewed. In fact, the changing demographic of film critics, the Yelpification of film criticism, has only made the Oscar more predictable because there is less of a division between industry voters and so-called critics. When you were just talking about up to 20 critics in the big cities naming the year’s best they had more power to influence. But now, they can be a better indicator of how a larger consensus might vote. This is not exclusively true but it’s mostly true.
One of the big game-changing years in the Oscar race as we know it was 2010, when The King’s Speech won the industry and The Social Network won the critics. There has never been a more divisive year in Oscar history. The critics were so thoroughly aligned with The Social Network it won more awards than any other film ever has, including the big ones in the past, like L.A. Confidential.
Not since The Social Network have the critics wholly aligned behind one film, as though they were kind of embarrassed that they loved a movie the industry didn’t. But there were several factors working in the King Speech’s favor, namely, when word got around that awarding this film would help prop up the British Film Council, which was about to die, that gave voters what they always need during Oscar season: a sense of urgency.
They will rarely vote for a movie just because it’s a good movie. There always has to be something else propelling it forward. It didn’t hurt that the King’s Speech fell right into their wheelhouse – period movie, uplifting message, etc. Scorsese, the Coens, and Kathryn Bigelow all had the advantage of having urgency behind them. Making history, rewarding a deserving vet – people seem to want to have their vote count for something more than just confirming how good a film is.
To read: EW’s Best Picture odds in 1998, predicting Saving Private Ryan to win.
By the time Oscar voters get their ballot, that consensus has mostly taken shape. How large numbers of people are voting, what they’re thinking, it all becomes very obvious by the time nominations roll around, give or take a Llewyn Davis.
Many people are still thinking ten for Best Picture when they have to remember that we’re really talking about five. If you can call the top five — and then struggle with a few alternatives for the fifth spot — you can mostly get to what the general consensus might be for the year’s best films.
The industry changed so dramatically that studios could no longer push their major “Oscar movies” into the race as they’d done for decades. Now, the cat is out of the bag once people start seeing the movies, and since whether it is good or bad is dependent upon critics, bloggers and festival goers you pretty much have to have the goods now to win Best Picture.
In order to get nominated or win, a film has to run the gauntlet and emerge victorious or avoid the gauntlet altogether. I always think of it like Ripley carrying Newt past the mother Alien. If you can be quiet enough and stealthy enough you will not get attacked, chewed up and spit out. You can avoid everything – debate, controversy, hype, box office scrutiny. Movies like The Help and The Blind Side managed this but both of those films, it’s worth noting, were including in the years when Oscar had ten slots for Best Picture nominations and not five as they do now.
In a year like this one there is no way The Blind Side or The Help would have gotten in because that would have meant enough voters would have put those films on their top five. Top five means probably no animated, no documentary and mostly no tent poles. Top five usually means passionate response, beloved movie, excited admiration. It has yielded interesting results. The Academy should probably just go back to five or ten. But that doesn’t appear to be happening any time soon.
The gauntlet is a terrifying journey for most films. Twitter has completely altered how films are rolled out because instant reviews give you way too much distracting information that ultimately doesn’t mean much unless a film is obvious bad or obviously great. Most of us know a good film from a bad film, especially when you’re trying to figure out how a large consensus might vote. The gauntlet loves to play the game of Oscar bait vs. scrappy underdog that could. They love to hate on the Oscar bait because they can hate on Oscar voters too – so it’s a win-win. The Oscar bait movie is always knocked down off its pedestal as the scrappy underdog emerges victorious.
That’s one narrative. The other is the unstoppable winner, like The Artist, like No Country for Old Men. They are good films. They are shown early and nothing shown after them is better. Even if you have a Hugo or a There Will Be Blood, they end up being too divisive to win ultimately.
This year we seem to have both at once. We have our unstoppable winner with Boyhood, which hasn’t officially won anything major yet but either will or it won’t, depending on whether the sexiness has gone out of it for critics. We have our Oscar bait with Imitation Game and Unbroken, one has been seen the other hasn’t but has Angelina Jolie attached to it. We have our scrappy underdog with Selma and/or Whiplash and/or Birdman.
We will know what kind of year it is going to be once the New York Film Critics announce on December 1.
The Producers Guild has ten slots, and that often throws people. You can see how things changed by looking at the ten and then the years with five.
In 2009 and 2010, the PGA and Oscar were only off by one. In 2011, 2012 and 2013 they were off by two or three. While that isn’t a huge difference it does show that with ten it was easier to match the two. Having ten slots frees up the voter to be more liberal with his or her picks. When you only have five it becomes much more competitive.
In looking over the PGA’s chart since their inception, you can really see how the shift in date (2004) has made for a much more tight consensus – so much so that there isn’t all that much of a difference between the PGA, the DGA and Oscar now. https://www.awardsdaily.com/wiki/main-wiki/wiki/producers-guild-pga/
Finding five
So if you took last year’s nine and you tried to find what the five might be, it is always helpful to look at the Directors Guild, which has always been really good at predicting best Picture even if when it doesn’t predict Best Director.
Probably your five would have been:
12 Years a Slave
Gravity
American Hustle
Nebraska
Wolf of Wall Street
But that fifth could have also been Philomena, Her, Captain Phillips, or Dallas Buyers Club. Or those could be the stragglers. Either way, those last few films were still popular enough to make it with the trickle down votes. We’ll never know which films would be the top five but we kind of have an idea.
Last year and the year before the DGA named their nominees after the Academy had already turned in their ballots. In 2012, that completely shook up the race, so much so that DGA and Academy history was made when only two directors from the DGA’s list went on to be nominated for Oscar’s Best Director: Ang Lee for Life of Pi and Steven Spielberg for Lincoln.
But last year, things went relatively back to normal, with only one name missing between Oscar and DGA: Paul Greengrass for DGA and Alexander Payne for Oscar.
Still, going all the way back to when Oscar expanded the Best Picture nominations, 2009, all five Best Director nominees at the DGA were at least nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars. Except one: David Fincher for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
That means that when the DGA announce their top five for Best Director you can bet those five will all go on to be nominated for Best Picture — unless one of those five is named David Fincher.