The $11 Billion Year

by Anne Thompson

  In the end, the Academy deems 282 movies released in 2012 eligible for the Best Picture Oscar. But even for studio pictures backed by massive marketing campaigns, landing an actual Oscar nomination is a tricky and expensive dance that requires first and foremost getting the attention of the sixteen AMPAS branches that nominate a total of twenty-five categories in the Oscar race. (In 2013, a seventeenth branch, casting directors, will be added.) A movie must be seen to be admired.

  There’s never been more noise and clatter in the awards media space. Special awards campaign publicists are hired to navigate the people and movies through their paces. That’s because the press is an active participant in the process of selecting the candidates who nab the awards from critics groups and guilds necessary to build momentum. Especially in a year like 2012, with so many strong contenders vying for prizes, every single acceptance speech counts. If a contender lets the winning story arc pass to another film, it can wind up being ignored.

  Front and center within the industrial-awards complex are the trade publications, especially ancient rivals Variety and the Hollywood Reporter (I’ve worked for both), which now print weekly editions crammed with ads, plus dozens of special awards supplements. Then there are the websites such as Deadline, The Wrap, Awards Daily, In Contention, Movie City News, Hollywood Elsewhere, GoldDerby, and my home base, Indiewire. Even the major metropolitan dailies, the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times, rely heavily on Oscar “for your consideration” advertising—aimed squarely at guild and Academy members—and the endless interest (valuable eyeballs and traffic) that this glitzy race engenders.

  And thus distributors and publicists put their candidates through endless rounds of festival, guild, screening, and party appearances; Q&As; and interviews, leading, they hope, to many rounds of award ceremonies and wins. The cost for someone actually in the running is astronomical—for Silver Linings Playbook, the Weinstein Company spent hundreds of thousands of dollars jetting Jennifer Lawrence and her costly crew of stylists from one festival and award ceremony to another. The global promo blitz keeps her in contention on the awards circuit and is picked up by the likes of People and Us and fanzines that reach actual movie ticket buyers. It helps to sell the film at the box office.

  Sony Pictures Classics spends far less on Lawrence’s biggest Best Actress rival, eighty-five-year-old French Amour star Emmanuelle Riva, who with limited stamina travels only twice to the United States from her Paris apartment and attends select events, doing most of her interviews via phone or, in my case, by answering e-mail queries that are then translated by the film’s bilingual New York publicist, Sophie Gluck. Nonetheless, Riva becomes Lawrence’s biggest rival for the Oscar gold.

  Given the idiosyncratic nature of the Academy, inside Oscar prognosticators bring more to the race than the mathematical tools used by statisticians like the New York Times’ Nate Silver, who tries to apply his statistical election strategy to predicting the Oscars, but will only accurately guess four out of the six major categories. Experience and intuition—and listening to Academy voters—goes a long way toward figuring out which way the wind blows.

  Moderating multiple industry Q&A panels, which is Deadline Oscar columnist Pete Hammond’s stock in trade, can throw off your picks, because you tend to unconsciously favor the folks who zap you with their star wattage. In 2011, I rooted far too long for George Clooney and The Descendants before bowing to the inevitable Artist sweep. Over the years you get to know these folks, and they get to know you. Clooney’s one of the good ones. Does he work me like a politician? Yes. And I love it. That self-deprecating charm and savoir faire—along with his taste for quality material with no paycheck in mind—is why he’s an Oscar perennial.

  Back in the eighties, when I filed an annual “Oscar Predicts” column for Film Comment right after the nominations, I learned to figure out how to forecast the future based on the past, and to judge Academy tastes and behavior. Over the next years I shared my hard-won insight with my readers at LA Weekly, Entertainment Weekly, monthly magazine Premiere, and dailies the Hollywood Reporter and Variety. After I left the publication in 2009, I figured that if Variety could sell online Oscar ads at a premium on the daily blog Thompson on Hollywood, based on a large readership of Academy voters, so could rising Indiewire, which functions as both an industry trade catering to the independent film community and a consumer site for smart film and television fans.

  And so I still track the Oscar race online 24/7 during the full-tilt awards campaign season, from November 1 through the date that the final ballots are due. With the 2012 films, active Academy members can begin submitting their nomination ballots on December 17. They are due back to PricewaterhouseCoopers, an international accounting firm, on January 3, 2013. On Thursday, January 10, the nominations are announced at 5:30 a.m. Pacific time at the Academy building on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills. A celebratory nominees luncheon follows at the Beverly Hilton on February 4. On Friday, February 8, the final voting begins, with ballots due by February 19 at 5 p.m. And the winners are declared Sunday, February 24, during the 85th Academy Awards at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood.

  Things get particularly intense during the months of December and January, as the New York, Los Angeles, and other film critics hand out their awards, and the Golden Globes and Critics’ Choice Awards take place. Honors are also bestowed at this time by the Screen Actors, Directors, Writers, and Producers Guilds. The die is cast over the course of the long campaign as key events—anomalies, omissions, and surprises—irrevocably change the course of the Oscar race. All of these political machinations—and more—are in play during the uniquely competitive Oscar race of 2012.

  Here are ten things that change the course of the 2012 Oscars, in chronological order:

  January 28:

  BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD TAKES THE GRAND JURY PRIZE AT THE SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL

  The instant that the Sundance Grand Jury Prize is awarded to Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild, along with a cinematography award for Ben Richardson, Fox Searchlight has a shot at some award season wins. The distributor can boast of these prizes on every subsequent ad as it chases more awards down the line, just as it did with its 2006 Sundance labor of love Once, another must-see film created from scratch with a cast of unknowns and an unconventional narrative. After Beasts plays Un Certain Regard at Cannes and wins the Camera d’Or for best first film, Searchlight counterprograms the $1.8 million film against the summer behemoths in late June, looking to establish it as an indie hit going into award season.

  Searchlight’s canny marketers also make moviegoers aware of the film’s undeniable emotional impact with an online video campaign. The picture easily outgrosses the two top-grossing Sundance winners to date (The Brothers McMullen and Precious), which each passed $10 million; Beasts grosses $12.8 million despite never playing in more than 318 theaters, hardly an expected outcome.

  And Searchlight manages to take long-shot Beasts rookie Quvenzhané Wallis, age nine, from breakthrough actress at the National Board of Review on December 5 all the way to the youngest-ever Best Actress nomination. This was by no means a given, nor is a total of four Oscar nominations for the indie, including Picture, Adapted Screenplay, and Director.

  Searchlight’s other Sundance pickup is Ben Lewin’s delicate drama The Surrogate, later retitled The Sessions, which also won two Sundance prizes, the Dramatic Audience Award and a special jury prize for its ensemble acting, led by Helen Hunt and John Hawkes. They hold this one for the fall fests, as the challenging drama needs more branding and attention for Hunt and Hawkes’s literally naked performances. Despite some stellar reviews, the movie never takes off with audiences, topping out at $6 million domestic. Searchlight opts to place former Best Actress Oscar winner Hunt (As Good As It Gets) in the category of Supporting Actress rather than Lead Actress, both because they don’t want her to compete with Wallis and because they feel she has a better shot there.

  Actors assessing each othe
r’s performances tend to respond to vulnerability, disability, and degree of difficulty, all in ample evidence in The Sessions. But sex—as well as disability—can make people uncomfortable, so the intimate true story written and directed by unknown Australian Lewin doesn’t make it to the top of many screener piles. In the end, Hawkes and Hunt do score Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild nominations. On Oscar nominations morning, Hunt lands a Supporting Actress nod, but the Best Actor race is so tight this time that Winter’s Bone nominee Hawkes doesn’t make the cut.

  January 28:

  DOCUMENTARY SEARCHING FOR SUGAR MAN NABS TWO SUNDANCE PRIZES

  Swedish music docmaker Malik Bendjelloul’s moving biodoc Searching for Sugar Man, which Sony Pictures Classics picked up on opening night of the Sundance Film Festival, takes home two significant prizes on closing night: the World Cinema Documentary Audience Award and a special world cinema doc jury prize, the first of many more to come on the road to the Oscars.

  In a year packed with superior documentaries, both well made and compelling, Sugar Man slowly becomes the leading contender, popping at March’s SXSW Film Festival, winning best doc at the National Board of Review on December 5, and earning numerous critics’ awards. It never loses that spot, and by the end grosses a respectable $3.7 million domestic. The heartrending rediscovery of long-lost folk musician Rodriguez has legs—I see the sixty-nine-year-old play, rustily, at SXSW, but then he starts touring again, his songs return to airplay, and his career takes off. By the time 60 Minutes catches up with Rodriguez’s story on October 6, 2012, it seems that no other documentary has a chance.

  On the other hand, music docs don’t tend to do that well with the insular Academy documentary branch (then numbering 176 members), which new Academy governor Michael Moore has been trying to shake up. They tend to steer toward gravitas and away from show business. And thus intense competition comes from other Sundance titles with legs, including Kirby Dick’s muckraking military rape agitprop The Invisible War, Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s dystopian cityscape Detropia, and Lauren Greenfield’s recession-era riches-to-rags saga The Queen of Versailles.

  Oddly, even though the high-profile winner of the Sundance doc Grand Jury Prize, Eugene Jarecki’s brainy antidrug war polemic The House I Live In, is pushed by executive producer Brad Pitt and lands plenty of media attention, it never gains traction with critics groups, audiences . . . or documentarians.

  But the Oscar documentary race is harder to call than usual because in January 2012 Moore manages to push through radical new rules—meeting with some resistance and grumbling from the membership. Previously, small groups divided up the submissions, with each watching only a smattering of the films, which led to acclaimed docs such as Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man and Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning, Steve James’s Hoop Dreams, and Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line not being nominated. Under Moore’s new rules, all the members over the course of the year try to watch all eligible films on screeners—which does not mean they succeed.

  The problem had been that branch members’ well-intentioned zeal to make sure that every qualifying low-budget doc was screened to give it a chance at an Oscar (with or without a distributor) via small committees meant that if just one or two distempered voters didn’t like the movie, it was toast. That’s how the likes of Michael Apted’s Up series were overlooked over the years. “That’s over,” Moore tells me. “We have to stop the madness. Let’s open it up, start a democracy movement, stop the committees’ private voting. The editors vote for editors. Let the entire documentary branch pick the five nominees, and then let the entire Academy see all five films and vote.”

  The Academy also changes the rules to favor theatrically released films over TV fare from the likes of HBO. Now a film has to be shown in Los Angeles and New York and reviewed by the Los Angeles Times or New York Times in order to be eligible. “Oscars are for real movies distributed in theaters,” says Moore. “Senna and Into the Abyss and The Interrupters were made to be in movie theaters. Their slots were taken away by films intended as TV movies.”

  The downside of asking the Academy doc branch to view all Oscar-qualifying docs is that now there is a screener pile. The same forces that come into play on the feature side—marketing, publicity, for your consideration ads, dog-and-pony shows—bring to voters’ attention the films that have been lauded and feted and bought and paid for. “Our branch is not swayed by Harvey,” insists Moore. “We’re a different breed.”

  Obviously, the likes of Oscar winners Moore (Bowling for Columbine) and Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side) are already name brands whose films will get released and moved to the top of the pile. At the bottom will be all the little movies from nowhere with no marketing budget that no one has ever heard of. That’s what documentary voter Lynne Littman was afraid would be lost with the new rules: at least with the old committee system, everything got screened.

  Now smaller filmmakers without distributors, who maybe don’t have fest awards to tout, will have to use their limited means and moxie to gain some traction, lest their films remain buried. This is one area where Moore, for all his populism, acts more like a Republican: Let the market rule. Moore’s argument: We should be like the rest of the Academy.

  The doc branch has always pushed for making docs available on screeners, and now they will do the same with the final voting. No longer do voters have to sign into a screening in New York or Los Angeles to vote. This instantly removes one favorite vote-rigging strategy for smaller films. Once nominated, filmmakers could rigorously control the number of screenings so that only the films’ passionate supporters would see them and therefore be part of a critical voting block. (Members like Moore, who lives in Michigan and hadn’t seen all films in a theatrical setting, couldn’t vote.) Moore’s move brings documentaries closer to being on the same footing as feature films. And Academy CEO Dawn Hudson has long pointed out that the advent of screeners opened up the Oscars to the indies.

  There’s still the question of how the Academy will handle small features in an increasingly digital universe that is no longer defined by theatrical release. “Five years from now (with the possible exception of superhero blockbusters) the theatrical market for not just docs but fiction films may be in peril,” Alex Gibney tells me after the 2013 Oscars. “My biggest concern comes for innovative theatrical releases on VOD and online streaming which will be more and more prevalent. If the Academy doesn’t account for those, this will become the blockbuster rule. I would still like the doc branch to tinker with this current formula to preserve the importance of theatrical films but in a much broader context.”

  Thus while Moore is still fighting for films to be seen in theaters, market forces are taking them online. How will the Academy handle that going forward? The twenty-five-member exec committee of the Academy doc branch, at least, has built in a review policy, so it can poll its members and see how the new process works. “We will not leave any stone unturned,” says Moore. “We want to be fair and just, egalitarian and transparent.”

  While the members have a tough time watching some 132 documentary films, and naturally tend to see the ones that grab the most attention via film festival and critics and doc group wins, the final shortlist of fifteen is the strongest in years—it includes Searching for Sugar Man and several of its Sundance competitors, even self-distributed Detropia. All are sent to the members to watch, and screeners of the final five—Searching for Sugar Man, The Invisible War, AIDS history How to Survive a Plague, and Mideast films The Gatekeepers and 5 Broken Cameras—are sent to the entire Academy.

  Sony Pictures Classics is in the happy position of having two front-runners in the doc category. Searching for Sugar Man keeps winning awards, and their year-end release, Dror Moreh’s The Gatekeepers, featuring interviews with the five heads of Israel’s security arm Shin Bet, is also knocking out audiences and Academy voters.

  Why are so many docs so good these days? “There are two things going
on,” SPC’s Michael Barker tells me at the Academy nominees lunch. “On a technical level documentarians like Dror and Malik are making docs for movie theaters, that work in theaters best, and also work on TV and DVD. These five docs are made to be seen in movie theaters, which elevates them. And due to current events and global politics, documentaries are becoming so much more important to the public.”

  April 22:

  ANNE HATHAWAY’S “I DREAMED A DREAM” FROM LES MISÉRABLES WOWS AT CINEMACON

  As soon as Universal’s marketing department, which had been so nervous about all the singing in Les Misérables, made the call to unveil footage of the tear-flooded Anne Hathaway’s heartbreaking rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream” to exhibitors and media at CinemaCon in April, she became the front-runner for Best Supporting Actress. Hunt and her fellow nominees never had a chance. In fact, the studio anchored much of its marketing campaign on that song; it was undeniably moving and showed people what the movie was about: raw emotion.

  It became an accepted truth that Hathaway had a gold statue in the bag and could not lose, short of some major PR catastrophe. Indeed, Hathaway was forced to dodge some bullets. After a photograph of her leaving a limo wearing an edgy sleek black dress with a revealing deep slit but no underwear was plastered all over the Internet, she deftly responded to Matt Lauer on The Today Show:

  It kind of made me sad on two accounts. One, I was very sad that we live in an age when someone takes a picture of another person in a vulnerable moment and rather than delete it and do the decent thing, sells it. And I’m sorry that we live in a culture that commodifies sexuality of unwilling participants. Which brings us back to Les Mis, because that is what my character is. She is someone forced to sell sex . . . So, yeah, let’s get back to Les Mis.