And the Oscar goes to someone
Pandemic casts shadow over awards process
In any normal Hollywood year, winter is awards season, when hundreds of screenings, ceremonies, panel discussions and upscale cocktail receptions pack the calendars of film professionals in Los Angeles, London and New York.
At this dizzying barrage of events — this would normally be a particularly busy week ahead of the Golden Globes on Sunday and the start of Oscar-nominations voting next Friday — contenders smile, tell war stories and patiently repeat their process to the working professionals and retirees who decide their fate while holding glasses of wine and plates of finger food. The process helps winnow the field of competing films for upcoming awards.
The pandemic has upended the rites of awards season, moving some panel discussions to video and scrapping many others. In its place, voters are delving into films via a screen in their living rooms, watching on a portal set up by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. It is neither a social nor simple process: Voters opening up the screening app recently would have found themselves confronted with 177 films to consider, with little guidance on which to watch.
Interviews with 14 executives and consultants who lead voter-influence campaigns — many spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the competitive nature of their work — describe a heavy toll as a business that normally gathers in glamorous settings to fete fictional calamities now finds itself trying to survive real ones. The changes have uprooted a sub-industry, and could bring a slew of dark horses and underdogs to the Oscar stage when that show airs April 25.
“Without all of these events, this might be the purest award season,” said Dave Karger, a veteran award expert and a personality on the cable network TCM. “It also might be the strangest.”
The lack of in-person gatherings already has had a surreal effect on the Globes. When the award show's winners (decided by the roughly 90 journalists of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association) are announced Sunday, they will come from a list that includes such top nominees as the Kate Hudson drama Music, a movie few pundits had even heard of before it was nominated.
“With muted campaigns, no industry events and very few seeing print trades, the usual consensus-building is gone, and voters are left to what they actually think,” tweeted Matthew Belloni, the former editor of The Hollywood Reporter, after the Globes announcement. “The Oscars might be equally shocking.”
The average film fan may be unaware of the ad-spending, jet-setting, ref-working and flesh-pressing that typically precedes the major awards shows — all to increase awareness and, ultimately, rustle up support from the 9,900 industry-based members of the academy who vote on the Oscars.
The cost of a campaign can exceed $20 million per film, but executives believe the price is worth it — in marketing, talent relations and, of course, bragging rights.
Last year's stunningly outsider best picture winner, Bong Joon Ho's Parasite, could be chalked up in part to the director and the film's stars repeatedly charming voters at post-screening mixers, which helped gain attention for a Korean-language film that might otherwise have escaped their notice. An Oscar season with less ballyhoo may not be as susceptible to lobbying, experts say. But it also robs underdogs of a shot.
Even bigger contenders can find themselves adrift, as voters swim in choices with few lane markers.
“Running an awards campaign during a global pandemic,” said an executive at a company in the hunt, “is strategizing and planning while on quicksand.”