(By Ann
Hornaday, Washington Post, February 24, 2012)
Okay, I still think those things are
true. And, along with other complainers this year, I agree that the 2012 race
is pretty ho-hum. The jaunty silent, black-and-white movie “The Artist” is all
but guaranteed to soft-shoe its way to snagging the big awards. Most of its fellow
nominees are movies mired in safe, snuggly nostalgia for times gone by, both
cinematic and real-world. But seen
through another lens, this year’s race offers a degree of hope, not just for
the Academy Awards but for the movie industry in general. And the best of the
nominated films exemplify why, in recent years, I’ve come to value the Oscars —
not for rewarding artistic merit (they do so only occasionally) or an index of
the zeitgeist (“Crash” over “Brokeback Mountain”? Really?), but for their role in
preserving a kind of movie that might otherwise cease to exist.
Of all the endangered species in
Hollywood, perhaps the most overlooked might be the adult drama — the kind of
mid-budget, modestly scaled, smartly written movie that seemed to be so common
in the 1970s. Back then, the genre was typified by taut, no-nonsense films like
“Chinatown” and “All the President’s Men.” Their present-day analogs are
“Michael Clayton” or “The Social Network” — smart, stylish movies geared toward
grown-ups that, were it not for the Oscars, would be less likely to find
purchase in Hollywood’s current business model.
That model, more than ever, is defined
by two kinds of movies. At one end are the “tent-pole movies,” blockbusters
geared toward teens that cost a fortune to make and market, but are guaranteed
to make their money back because they’re known quantities among the young
audiences Hollywood caters to like the world’s most indulgent helicopter
parent. At the other end of the economic
matrix live the micro-budgeted guerilla indies, which cost a nickel to make,
get scooped up at a festival and go on to make a healthy if not spectacular
profit, if only because they cost so little to produce and market.
In the middle of these two extremes
are movies that cost much more than a nickel to make, but have no pre-sold
niche markets to exploit. What’s more, nowadays they’re increasingly competing
for audiences with, of all things, television: Not only does the adult drama’s
core audience prefer to wait for the DVD or video-on-demand download, but they
have better choices on TV itself. Why put up with parking-garage chicken
fights, bad expensive popcorn and texting teenagers at the mall when you can
watch your TiVo’ed episode of “The Good Wife” from the quiet safety of your couch?
All of these factors have contributed
to making quality, sophisticated grown-up movies a risky proposition in
Hollywood, where it can cost almost $100 million these days to create,
advertise and promote a piece of product. And this is where the Oscars — with
all their hype, sequins and bad production numbers — swoop in to improbably
save the day. “Awards season has become
an incredibly critical, essential element in marketing these films,” Variety
Executive Editor Steven Gaydos told me last week, adding that, with films no
longer afforded the luxury of staying in theaters for weeks on end to build
word-of-mouth, the Oscars have become “the world’s most cost-effective way of
marketing drama.”
That strategy begins in the fall, when
many studios launch their films at festivals in Telluride, Venice and Toronto.
There, critics and bloggers begin the buzz about which directors, actors and
films might be awards contenders, with word-of-mouth building once they begin
to bestow their own honors and 10-best lists. As the movies begin to appear in
theaters, filmmaking guilds begin to hand out their own kudos, lending yet more
inevitability to movies deemed Oscar sure-things. Between the Golden Globes and
the announcement of Oscar nominees in January, what began as a
little-movies-that-could suddenly seem to be everywhere, as people make a
mental note to see what all the fuss is about.
Studios pay dearly to help the buzz
along, of course, and the escalating arms race of Oscar campaigning has led
some industry insiders to call for a freeze. Citing Sony’s Oscar push for “The
Social Network” — which cost a reported $7 million to $10 million — former
agent and manager Gavin Polone recently complained that “the cost of two Oscar
campaigns could comfortably fund the total production budget for a movie like
‘Drive’ or ‘Midnight in Paris.’ ” Magnolia Pictures President Eamonn Bowles
agreed, adding that the awards-season strategy is largely based on myth. “There
are, of course, instances where winning the Academy Award unlocks a film’s
economic potential,” he said. “But the reality is that the vast majority never
recoup or come close to recouping the amounts spent on trying to win the
award.” Still, some films have recouped
with a vengeance: Last year, “The King’s Speech,” which cost a paltry $15
million to make, went on to earn just south of $400 million at the box office;
“Slumdog Millionaire” enjoyed a similar Oscar “bump,” going on to earn more
than $300 million worldwide.
With visions of such Oscar-season
Cinderellas dancing in their heads, studio executives might be more willing to
greenlight projects that otherwise wouldn’t fit neatly into their spreadsheets.
And even if they don’t reap the regal financial rewards on a par with “The
King’s Speech,” they acquire something more priceless: prestige. When “The
Descendants” and its star George Clooney won at the Golden Globes in January,
“the first person to shake Clooney’s hand was Rupert Murdoch,” says Hollywood
Reporter Oscar columnist Scott Feinberg, referring to the chairman of the media
conglomerate that owns the small studio that released the movie. Awards, Feinberg says, “appeal to the egos of
the studio chiefs and the studio executives. . . . In some ways it wipes the
stain off what they do the rest of the year.”
No one has proved savvier at
husbanding the Oscar’s marketing and reputation-burnishing resources than
Harvey Weinstein, who perfected his strategy by steering “Shakespeare in Love”
to best picture victory in 1999 (beating out “Saving Private Ryan,” no less.)
It was Weinstein who figured out how to make a movie about a stuttering king
with no big stars a must-see cultural event, and who cannily picked up “The
Artist” at Cannes last year, predicting that a pastiche of Hollywood tropes
about an actor feeling pinched between changing technology and a tough economy
would be catnip to the academy’s voting members — most of whom are actors
feeling pinched between changing technology and a tough economy.
It looks like Weinstein’s calculation
will pay off again this year. But where “The Artist” qualifies as something of
a high-end novelty film, at least three other nominees — “The Descendants,”
“Moneyball” and “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” — exemplify precisely the kind
of intelligent, mid-range movies that stand to benefit from Oscar-season
awareness. That synergy worked particularly well last year, when “The King’s
Speech” was nominated alongside “The Social Network,” “Black Swan,” “The
Fighter” and “True Grit.”
All of those movies were made for
modest budgets and all were modestly to stunningly profitable, thanks in large
part to the added visibility provided by their Oscar campaigns. Surely the
movies would have been made even if the Oscars didn’t exist. But they would not
have been as successful, making it less likely that studios would greenlight
similar projects down the road. “They’re critic-driven and
execution-dependent,” Gaydos says of the adult drama niche. “And they’re the
most risky films to finance today. Anything that makes them less risky or more
viable — such as [an awards season] when they can be celebrated and marketed
for a very reasonable amount of money — is good.” As if to prove that point, Weinstein
announced last week that he’s planted yet another seedling: Meryl Streep and
Julia Roberts will begin filming “August: Osage County” — an adaptation of
Tracy Letts’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play — this fall. Which positions it perfectly for an Oscar run
in 2014.
