In 178 Universal Pictures screens a Vietnam war drama called the Deer Hunter for a test audience in Detroit, Michigan. Despite starring a Robert De Niro, hot off the tail of the recent success of Taxi Drver and the Godfather Part two, John Khazali and Meryl Streep, the test screening bombed. Universal Pictures executive Tom Mount called it the worst screening he'd ever seen.
Fearing they had a flop on their hands and unsure of how to proceed, Universal execs turned to Alan Carr, writer and producer who had recently seen massive success with Greece and who was gaining a reputation for his marketing strategy. As Robert Hoffler tells the story in his book Party Animals, Carr knew just the way to market what he called a long movie about poor people who go to war and get killed. Michael Chimino for the Deer Hunter, the key was going to be leveraging the power of the Academy Award nominations.
Oscar Bait had already been a term for several decades at this point, referring to movies that were obviously trying to get Oscar nominations. But Carr's innovation was this screen the film in limited release for just two weeks at the end of the year, the minimum the movie needed to qualify for the Academy Awards. Then, once the nominations were announced, expand the film into wide release, using the nominations to drive up box office sales.
The scheme worked. Deer Hunter won five oscars, including best picture, and ultimately made almost $50 million in the box office off of its $15 million budget. And Oscar baiting as a deliberate marketing strategy was born.
And it's a strategy that's still going strong to this day. If you've ever wondered why there's so many movies that get packed into the last few weeks of December, this is a big reason why the Oscars, the oldest worldwide entertainment award show, are an annual source of excitement and frustration among many movie fans and filmmakers alike. At this point, the online film discourse decrying the Oscars sins and missteps is almost as much of a cinephile tradition as the award ceremony itself.
One of my old videos that participates in this trend was a big part of my early YouTube success, and we all know the frustration of a movie we love being snubbed or the surprise of an unexpected win, good or bad. But behind these choices, both the ones that frustrate us, the ones that confuse us, and the ones that feel deserved, lies an invitation only club with a membership list that's kept a secret and many other interconnected forces trying to exert their influence on the outcome of the awards. While a lot of time is spent discussing the outcome of the machinery of the Academy Awards.
Not a lot of time is spent analyzing the machinery of the awards themselves. But whether you're an engrossed film fan closely following the awards season, or someone who just thinks that the Oscars are a good old boys club of vain celebrities handing out golden statues to each other, I think you do have to acknowledge that the Academy Awards have an impact on the industry. Many filmmakers do strive to get recognized at the Oscars, and so what gets recognized there has an impact on the kinds of movies we get to see.
And because what gets nominated and what wins ends up influencing box office receipts. The kinds of things that win and get nominated have a big influence on the kinds of things that can get funding in Hollywood, which in turn affects what we get to watch. So I wanted to dig in to try to understand why they are the way they are.
What are the forces behind the scenes that influence the snubs, nominations and wins the Oscars have a pretty bad track record for giving the awards to the movies that will continue to resonate with the hearts and minds of audiences for decades afterwards. Filmmakers who are now considered legendary greats like Stanley Kubrick and Alfred Hitchcock, never got best director awards. Similarly, some of the movies that are now considered the greatest of all time, like Citizen Kane, Vertigo and Goodfellas, were overlooked by the Academy in favor of what a lot of people would argue are lesser films.
Some of the best actors and filmmakers working today have never won any awards, and significant quality work from women, people of color and other marginalized groups is consistently overlooked. Obviously, we can't expect an award ceremony to be perfect and prescient. It's much easier to pick out the great films in hindsight, but sometimes these oversights seem obvious even as they're happening, and we're hoping here to gain some understanding into why these missteps happen.
It's the job of the Academy members to choose the nominees and the winners, so it makes sense to start our analysis by understanding who those people are. Access to academy membership is largely preserved for professionals working in the film industry. You get in by invitation only.
Either you have to be nominated for an award, or two existing members have to sponsor your membership, while you also meet certain professional qualifications, depending on which branch you're joining. For example, if you're joining the director's branch, unless you've been nominated, you need a minimum of two directorial credits. The actual list of the roughly 10,000 members is kept a secret, so it's hard to know what exactly the demographics of the membership are.
But a 2012 study by the LA Times found that 77% were male and 94% were white. The demographics have definitely started to diversify since then, in part due to a concerted effort by the Academy. But it's definitely worth noting that for most of the Oscars history, they have been majority white and majority male.
This demographic slant and its biases have definitely had an impact on some of the undeserved snubs. One example of this is the omission of Spike Lee's do the right thing from that year's best picture nominees. Do the right thing is a movie that by pretty much any current rating system or metric you use, is a better movie than the movie that was chosen as the best picture winner that year.
Drving Miss Daisy do the right thing is a lot more artistically original and interesting and has had a lot more lasting impact. It's telling that the academy voters left do the right thing off the nomination list entirely driving Miss Daisy in favor of choosing another much more conservative movie about racism directed by a white guy. There's also the fact that prior to 2017, only four women were ever nominated for best director.
This hashtag Oscars. So white critique has been probably the biggest public critique of the Oscars over the last decade, and I think it's a valid one and an important issue. What gets recognized at the Oscars has a big impact on who gets to work in the industry and who gets funding.
An awareness of this issue has pressured the academy into making some changes. The lack of diversity among the voters isn't the only reason, though, for snubs and inexplicable wins. There's another force that I think has a big impact on who and what gets recognized.
And to see that force, we have to look beyond who's voting and into the voting process itself. Check this out. This is the list of every movie from 2023 that's eligible for best picture.
Okay, so imagine you're an Academy voter. You're getting to the end of the year, and part of your job is to choose from this list ten movies that you feel are the best of the year. There are 265 movies on this year's list.
That's a lot of movies. That's more movies than I watched last year. And I essentially watch movies for a living.
And yeah, the Academy voters are probably people who watch a lot of movies and they get access to screenings at the Academy theater if they live in LA. But they're also industry professionals who work in an industry where people notoriously work long hours. They're busy people.
And that's fine. I would much rather most of these people making these movies focus on their craft and their art rather than watching and consuming 265 movies every year. But it means that step one in an academy voter choosing their nominations is choosing which of these movies they're even going to watch.
And it's here in that decision that a large amount of influence quietly slips into the process. And the oscar goes to. In 1999, Steven Spielberg's saving private ryan was the favorite to win best picture.
So it was a bit of an upset when instead the award went to Shakespeare in love. This is just fantastic. Thank you to the members of the academy.
The other guy that we really need to thank, though, is Harvey Weinstein, who had the guts, the courage, the commitment to make this picture and get it done. Here he is. What does it say about Mirama's film?
It says that this year we made a good movie and that the people responded. So it's really all about the movie. Is it, though?
The reason this happened has been pretty thoroughly investigated and the general consensus among journalists is that convicted sex abuser Harvey Weinstein is the guy responsible. Weinstein was the driving force behind what Vanity Fair calls an unprecedented blitzkrieg of press for Shakespeare and love. According to reports, he became obsessed with the movie winning best picture and started aggressively promoting it to Academy voters.
There are conflicting reports about what exactly went on, including stories about Miramax allegedly pushing the boundaries of the academy's rules about promotion, including breaking the rule against phone lobbying directly to academy members. There's even rumors of a secret campaign to tarnish saving Private Ryan's reputation by saying that it was really only good because of the first 15 or 20 minutes. Weinstein didn't invent this.
He wasn't the first or last to market directly to Academy voters. But Shakespeare and Love's win has become a definitive example of a time when this kind of marketing directly influenced the outcome of the awards. If you pick up a trade publication like american cinematographer anywhere around awards season, you'll see a lot of ads like this.
Literally every other page. It's like killers of the Flower Moon. Best cinematography, best cinematography.
Wonka. American fiction. There's Emmy ads in here, too.
The crown, Saltburn. It didn't work. It didn't get the nomination for best cinematography.
This is the kind of magazine that a lot of professional cinematographers are reading. A lot of them potentially academy members. Those are the people who are choosing the nominees for best cinematography.
And so these ads are targeting those people directly in hopes that it will provoke them to nominate one of those films for best cinematography. These kinds of ads are just part of the film's marketing budget. If it's an awards contender, billboards are commonly taken out across LA, where a lot of academy voters live.
David lynch even did his own avant garde version of this kind of promotion once when he sat on a street corner with a cow and a big sign that said for your consideration and had a picture of Laura Dern from his movie Inland Empire. Sadly, the Academy voters here didn't see the brilliance of this. This kind of targeted marketing, alongside the just normal marketing directed at the general public, plays a big role at making a movie recognizable.
And I think it goes without saying that the more aware of a movie you are, the more likely you are to pick it out of this massive list as something to potentially watch. The real list that the voters are choosing the nominees from is not really this list, but a much shorter one of the movies that are eligible and that they've actually watched. And some of the determining factors in what they decide to watch are factors that are divorced from the artistic quality of any of the options.
Just because a film has a bigger marketing budget doesn't mean it had better cinematography. In some ways, there's really no way around this. You can't force people to watch 250 movies.
You could theoretically come up with some system where each voter is assigned like ten or 20 movies from the qualified films at random, and then they can only nominate from that list. But participation in this whole system is essentially a volunteer activity that you're getting filmmaking professionals to engage in. So I think making it complicated and a lot of work is going to be a pretty tough sell.
You could theoretically ban marketing directed specifically at academy voters, but you can't ban marketing a film in general. Marketing plays a huge role in which movies people hear about, and people are going to choose to watch movies from the movies they've heard about, and they're going to choose the nominees from the movies they've seen. And the movies that get chosen as nominees make more money in the box office.
And the kinds of movies that can potentially make more money are the kinds of movies that get more funding, which means they have a larger marketing budget and the entire cycle continues. So ultimately, I don't have a solution here. There's not a way to really fix this aspect of the Oscars, but I think it's helpful to understand and recognize this concept when we're engaging in discussions surrounding the Oscars.
Yes, they're a great starting point for discussing the best filmmaking each year, but they're also part of a multibillion dollar marketing industry, both influenced by marketing dollars and influencing a movie's commercial success. Though I think it's good to keep in mind that the amount of money a movie has in its marketing budget has basically nothing to do with the film's artistic merit or the quality of work done on that film. These things might be starting to shift, though.
There were some reports last year that the bump nominees and winners saw in box office was declining, and if this Oscar bump diminishes or goes away, it'll have a big impact on the Oscars. But I think at this point this shrink probably has more to do with Oscar buzz driving streaming sales and views instead of box office receipts, and I'm not really trying to come at this from a position of superiority. These same forces that influence what academy voters choose to watch ultimately are kind of going to have an impact on me, which affects what I talk about on this channel.
I do actually try to avoid as much advertising and film marketing as I possibly can, but some of it is unavoidable and ultimately I choose to go see some things because they have buzz or because they're successful, and sometimes they have a lot of buz or are successful because they've had a lot of marketing. But with all that said, with knowing the context of the machinery behind the Oscars, and with knowing that maybe we shouldn't put too much stock in what they say about a film's artistic merit or quality, ultimately, maybe you want to know what I think of this year's nominees and my picks and predictions to win. Since you're on Nebula, you get immediate access to the follow up video, my breakdown of this year's Oscar nominations.
I'll put a link to that video in the description below. You should go check it out.
