20 Weeks to Oscar By David Polandpoland@moviecitynews.com
20 Weeks To Oscar: Sell Short
In the real world, where studios are just selling movies with massive marketing campaigns, the marketing windows have shrunk in recent years. Big TV buys can wait for 3 weeks out if the awareness has been pumped up via publicity for the months and months before. Have Oscar campaigners taken this lesson to heart? Are the early September festivals just an awareness play, followed by a 6-to-8 week window of lingering, and then the real campaign in the course of just a few weeks?
Read the full article »20 Weeks To Oscar: Surveying The Board
Interstellar lands this week.
That leaves Unbroken, The Gambler, Selma, American Sniper, A Most Violent Year, Into The Woods, Big Eyes, and Exodus: Gods & Men
That’s a lot of movies, given an already pretty narrow field.
Read the full article »21 Weeks To Oscar – Carlos & Joey & Cash, Oh My! (Part 2 of 2)
Should anyone really care that Joey Berlin has built a “critics” group that now affords him a rather significant annual payday? Does it matter than Carlos de Abreu made up awards out of nothing but the contents of his giant scrotal sack and now has gotten rich on the money that returns virtually nothing of value to the studios? Eighty-something foreign-language speakers have made themselves seem worth much, much more than the time of day because they have a TV show that has been successfully and inaccurately positioned as an Oscar precursor… should we care? The Academy has made The Oscars less and less about movies and more and more about being like the Jimmy Fallon show with statues (Oscar nominee beer pong, coming this spring!) because they are obsessed with being cutting edge, when the only real distinction of the organization is the many years it takes to get invited to join, thus given its awards real weight… does it matter?
Read the full article »21 Weeks To Oscar – Carlos & Joey & Cash, Oh My! (Part 1 of 2)
How could I write about what a con the Hollywood Foreign Press Association was – and is – with its eight-something barely-employed writers puffing up with self-importance and raping studio coffers all year long while showing no semblance of journalistic integrity whatsoever, and be charmingly amused by Carlos who made up awards, chose winners by himself in negotiations with distributors, with no other purpose than to line his own pockets? I was being a hypocrite.
Read the full article »22 Weeks To Oscar: Bring On The Narratives!
Even before we really know – and no one really knows jack excrement this early, especially in this season – we do know some of the strategies waiting to be unfurled in the next two months.
If you wanna to win an Oscar, you gotta have a narrative.
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