And so, we are at the end.

For a year of predictable outcomes, it is actually fairly remarkable how many major awards seem to be up for grabs at this late date.

I don’t think many people expect Slumdog Millionaire to get anything less than 6 Oscars, including Picture, Director, and Screenplay. But in the Top 8 categories, Rourke vs Penn, Winslet vs Streep vs Hathaway vs Leo, Cruz vs Davis, and Stanton vs Black are all still uncertain in many minds. Add Slumdog’s three and Heath Ledger as locks and you have half the top awards in play.

It’s the rarest kind of Oscar stat these days… one that doesn’t seem to have been written about endlessly… that in five of the last ten years and in the last four years in a row, the Best Picture winner has been nominated in one or no acting categories. (Slumdog, No Country For Old Men, The Departed, Crash. Lord of The Rings)

So much for the mythology of the Actor’s Branch controlling the Academy.

It’s not just the Best Picture winner. This year, four of the five nominees have just one acting nominee or less. Only Milk managed two. The most actor-nominated film was Doubt, with four, count ‘em, four nominees… and no Best Picture nod. In fact, the only other nomination for the film was for John Patrick Shanley’s Adapted Screenplay from his own play… which was – by his reckoning- more a work of adapting as a director than as a writer.

Last year, four of the five nominees scored just one acting mod each… and the big get, three, for Michael Clayton. The big “actors’ movies” that didn’t get BP nods, besides Clayton, were Into The Wild, Gone Baby Gone, American Gangster, and The Savages… each of which managed only one acting nod.

Go back one more year and again, 3/5 of the nominees had one acting nod or less… and just two each for the other 2… all fours nods in Supporting.

It’s been nine years since a Lead Actor win for the Best Picture. And while Million Dollar Baby was just five Oscars ago, it was the only example of the Lead Actress winning in the last eleven years.

Go back a little further and the lead actors winning for best pictures is not so rare; Crowe for Gladiator, Spacey for American Beauty, Paltrow for Shakespeare in Love, Hanks in Forrest Gump, Foster in Silence of the Lambs, Tandy in Driving Miss Daisy, Hoffman in Rain Man… that’s seven times in thirteen years. The only lead male in the Best Picture to even be nominated in the last seven years was Eastwood for Million Dollar Baby.

And while Slumdog may be written off as an anomaly with its 17-year-old lead, along with the Crash ensemble and the Rings ensemble, others overlooked are nothing close to unknown: Tommy Lee Jones, Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, and Richard Gere.

But really… look at it… the last four years… all ensemble movies. Big stars in a couple… not so much in the other two… but ensembles have won. Is that good news or bad news for Nine? Who knows? Really, neither. It’s not really news. It’s just a curious statistic. And those change all the time.

But back to this year…

Even after you crack the Top 8, there is still a lot to ponder. Will things sway more to Batman or Ben Button… or with they come out dead even… or will they get rocked by underdogs.

Even in Foreign and Doc, there seem to be clear frontrunners in Waltz with Bashir and Man on Wire, but with a much smaller group of voters qualifying to vote for these in the finals (likely under 500 for each), you never know. Sony Classics is putting up the strongest fight against their own film with The Class, a film that’s grown in profile as we’ve come closer to a vote. And while Man on Wire was the top grosser of the five nominees and the only one to crack the MCN Top Ten List Chart’s Top 30 (at #9), the small voting group could lead to anything… and there are big emotional connections around some of the other films while Wire is a beautiful piece of filmmaking and a great story, but not a heart-tugger.

And then there is the show itself…

Which neither I nor this website is going to work to spoil for anyone.

It would be a mistake to expect too much.

And it would be a mistake to not pay close attention.

It would be a little silly of anyone to argue too intensely that the Oscars were ever a pure, innocent celebration of the best work of the preceding year. The stakes were, indeed, much, much lower. It was less of a marketing machine. But every major wanted its piece of the action and by 1936 (Year 6), there were a dozen Best Picture nominees (and the film won Best Actor and Actress). In 1945, they went to the five Best Picture format. In 1953, the show was first televised. That was two years before this year’s producer, Bill Condon was born.

And I think that is a real point to make.

Condon grew up in some realm of the modern Oscars. His memories, however rose-colored, have led to a passion for the event. He, like his entire generation, grew up on what was in the theaters and what ended up on network television and much later in its life, on local stations. I don’t know what films he watched over and over and over again on the television set. (Who knows? Maybe he didn’t watch much TV.) For me, it was The Little Rascals, the Blondie series, Penny Serenade, and, starting in my pre-teens, the Saturday night line-up on CBS, which was replaced by the ABC line-up, which was replaced by the NBC line-up, and so on…

But every year, it was the Oscars. For me, I think the first one where a Best Picture that I had seen in first run, before the show, was The Sting in 1974. I was 9. That was also the year of The Streaker. I think I missed the 1975 Oscars. The only “Best Picture” I would have seen before the show was The Towering Inferno. The other four films (Godfather 2, Chinatown, The Conversation, Lenny) would be the baseline for my film education for decades to come. I didn’t see Barry Lyndon in first run, but I did see One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest twice before it was nominated. That would become the norm. By the next year, I was deeply invested in Network winning… which it did not. The 1978 Oscars were the first group of films I remember watching over and over and over again on HBO.

There are not a lot of other things that I have done every year for 33 years.

Condon was 18 for the Oscars show I first remember watching. He probably remembers the years with no host (1969 – 1971). He surely remembers the six years after that with no fewer than 4 hosts each year. Charlton Heston and Rock Hudson in ’73, John Huston in ’74, The Rat Pack in ’75, Gene Kelly in ’76, Beatty and Pryor in ‘77. Then Carson… then Crystal. There were others in between and since, but it’s always been some form of flailing with various levels of success.

But there was something that really did feel special in those years. The hosts were real life icons. They were not just members of the industry, they WERE the industry.

Who IS the industry right now? That is one of the prime questions that Mr. Condon & Mr. Mark will try to answer on Sunday night. Is it this month’s hottest star… the senior circuit… the stars of Condon’s youth, of my youth, of a 30seomthing’s youth, of Watchmen… the stars of tomorrow?

If their answer is close enough to right, the show will be the party we all wanted to be at and got to watch on TV. If not, then it will be another show with some memorable reactions when people win, some great sets, so big moments and some disappointing moments. Respect will be paid. The thrill of the winners will be the most important drama of the night.

We all keep watching and waiting for that tingle in the spine because it matters so much and it matters not at all… but you can’t fake that tingle when it happens.

Here’s to the tingle!

– David Poland
February 19, 2009

Ladies & Gentlemen… children of all ages… seven Oscar nominees who really didn’t go into this season expecting to be attending the Academy Awards…

Viola Davis.
Courtney Hunt.
Richard Jenkins.
Scott Hamilton Kennedy.
Melissa Leo.
Martin McDonagh.
Michael Shannon.

All deserving.

All appreciating.

With nothing much to write about, no major upsets being seriously considered by anyone who knows much, and Michael Cieply at the NY Times apparently intent in reducing the paper of record to the Paper of Gossip before Nikki Finke can get her fangs into show night spoilers, this is where we really should be focusing.

I think we can say with 85% certainty that none of these Luck-Feeling (and Deserving) Seven are going to take home an Oscar of their own this year and 98% certainty that no more than one might score an upset. But that’s not the point.

Oscar is a celebration of the cinematic form. It is, in reality, a horse race. But like watching the Kentucky Derby each year, the beauty of that massive beast running at full speed, muscles flexing, rhythmically pushing forward… forward, it is more beautiful than all the odds-making, pre-game show, mint-julip-drinking, big hat-wearing, wealth-flaunting junk that makes it feel like a Calcutta whorehouse with the best landscaping ever.

Which performing monkeys will stop these seven on the red carpet on that Sunday night? And how quickly will their interview end if Angelina Jolie is willing to say, “Hello, I’m Angie,” for a second of shoulder-bearing airtime?

It’s not to say that Angie doesn’t matter. Or that these nominees are more deserving of love or attention than any other. But do you remember how exciting Ellen Page, Casey Affleck, Amy Ryan, and Tamara Jenkins, among others, were last year? Ryan Gosling, Penelope Cruz, Jackie Earle Haley, and Michael Arndt a couple of years ago? Terrence Howard, Rachel Weisz, Amy Adams, Bennett Miller, and Josh Olsen before that?

A couple of these folks are nominated again this year. Some are working towards their next big moments. One had a small role in one of last year’s big comic book movies while another is the central character in this year’s coming comic book sensation and another has written Toy Story 3, next year’s mega-Pixar film. A couple are moody and trying to figure out what they really want from this industry. And a few have found quiet opportunities involving television to keep paying their bills as they hold out for top notch work.

These people are the industry’s future.

Not every underdog is going to become a pillar of the industry. Of course. But these are the hungry people who, while getting the highest honor in the business, are still ready to bring themselves to the work with the best intentions and the hope of even higher highs.

I know… people want pretty pictures. And Michael Shannon is not as good an interview as George Clooney. But we should celebrate him and the others all the more for their lack of artifice… not because they are “above it,” but because they are artists reaching for more in this game.

Give Viola Davis that charming role.

Get Melissa Leo in that spaceship that’s going to save the world.

Talk Martin McDonagh into writing Ocean’s 14.

Figure out how the Coens will get Shannon into a leading role.

Let Courtney Hunt make a thriller for Sony.

Give Scott Hamilton Kennedy the money for his next doc, HBO.

And let Richard Jenkins just keep working… he was doing really well before this (and deserved a nom for North Country) and should keep doing the fine work he does. May all great character actors someday find their Tom McCarthy (who also brought us Peter Dinklage, who still works in unexpectedly complex and strongly written roles all the time).

Yeah… I am looking forward to Meryl and Downey being funny, to Danny Boyle being gracious, to the moment when Kate Winslet either gets her long-deserved Oscar or waits until next time (Paul Newman isn’t such a bad landmark to emulate, Kate), to seeing how they handle Heath’s win, and surely to a surprise or two.

But my heart will be with these underdogs… and some others who will lose… and some who will win… my heart will be with the passion of it all… even the passions of those behind the scenes of this year’s show.

It hasn’t been one of the great years at the cinema, but there is never a bad time to celebrate great work, whether it wins or loses a statue. The drama that matters most is the drama that will last with us for years and years to come.

– David Poland
February 5, 2009

The great irony of this year’s Oscars is the constant battle between the devil on one shoulder and the angel on the other.

The Devil says, “The year is boring… we know all the answers already… is a classic Hollywood fantasia set in a poverty-stricken country of amazing colors and sights telling the tale of an underdog overcoming the odds really the best we can do?”

The Angel says, “Here is a movie from a director who had gotten typed into being a success only in x-treme cinema, set in another country, often in another language, with three sets of young, inexperienced actors playing the same kids from single-digits to 20-ish, delving into the internationalism of both human aspiration and the medium of television (which might as well be movies), unafraid to deliver some of the harshest moments in mainstream cinema this year, yet emotionally kind and compelling to its core… all of this, made for a studio Dependent that has been put out of business, sold off, in part, by the parent studio to another studio’s Dependent that passed on its first opportunity to make it, sold brilliantly, surrounded by talent that is both charming and unusually generous and kind of spirit, and now in line to win The Oscar and all that comes with that honor.”

Which story is more compelling?

For me, there is no question. The Angel has the goods.

But as usual, the perception of what a better story is, in the media, is always the more ugly story.

And now, with every competing studio, in its heart, knowing that the big prize is simply out of reach, here comes the treachery. Truly thoughtless efforts by journalists buying into the scam that there is any more discontent over this film in India – where it was the third biggest opening ever by a non-Indian film – than there is here. I have had the conversations with people who feel that the ultimate upbeat nature of the film is not in sync with the harsh realities of Mumbai. Okay. I can’t argue what you feel. But as the man said, that’s why there is chocolate and vanilla and 29 other flavors and more.

Then there is the mean-spirited bile that somehow the younger kids in the film were “used” and abandoned by the film and filmmakers. This was the attack used against The Kite Runner last year which tied that film’s marketing and publicity team up in knots for months before the film died its own form of awards season death. As it turns out, Danny Boyle and Christian Colson not only didn’t take advantage of the kids, but have been investing in the future of these two young people/actors since well before the movie’s success.

The goal of the “opposition,” which may not be able to win, but can be dogged in keeping on the attack no matter how long the odds, is to build negativity around the feel-good film and to fire up the xenophobia of older Oscar voters.

One fine publicist, sounding completely aware of how absurd the idea that was being floated was, suggested that the film they were representing was an American alternative to the “it’s good and all” Slumdog.

Then there was the effort to claim that the film’s Co-Director: India, Loveleen Tandan, was the victim of a sexist slight… though she is mentioned by Danny Boyle and cast members all the time and singled out for special thanks. This too is an old spin, based on City of God, in which Fernando Meirelles gave a co-directing credit to Katia Lund – with whom Fernando had worked with on the lead up film to C.O.G. and who found and nurtured much of the young first-time actors on the film – and got slammed for it, even though he too was completely open about Katia’s contribution when asked.

Journalists often go along with these idiotic stories because, first and foremost, there is nothing else to write about.

The problem for the studio, which makes it doubly unfair, is that responding always seems defensive, even if you are not guilty. And not responding leads to some assumption of guilt.

Now… don’t think my praise of the great stories of this year’s Oscar season is just about Slumdog, a film that I have supported without reservation from the day I saw it. The other four nominees have Angelic stories to tell too.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a film that has gone as close as pre-production before being put into turnaround again… and again… and again… for over a decade. The ultimate choice of David Fincher, an aesthete of the highest order, was seriously daring. And the combination of the unsentimental Fincher and sentimentalist screenwriter Eric Roth results in what some people see as the best and others as the worst (and many in between) of all outcomes. But daring it is, even more so at its huge budgetary price.

Frost/Nixon – This adaptation of a great stage experience centering on two big performances by Michael Sheen and Frank Langella happens to be the perfect film for the very commercially savvy and directorially skilled Ron Howard. There who don’t see Howard as an emotionally raw, lay it out there, kind of director, but he found the resonance in this material as well, I think, as anyone could have and keeps it entertaining to boot. The performances are still tremendous and I expect this film will linger with viewers much, much longer that some expect.

Milk – Another hard-to-get-made project that has been on and off production schedules for over a decade, often intimidated by the great Oscar-winning documentary by Rob Epstein, The Times of Harvey Milk, made all the way back in 1984. The resulting film, directed by Gus van Sant, seems to be more controversial in the gay community than in the straight one, as Harvey Milk means such different things to different people who actually have an investment in the man’s legacy. Sean Penn gives a career best performance as Milk, overcoming mighty fears of what he might do playing a gay man who emerges from the closet and leads a movement. In fact, Van Sant, who obviously has no fear of making films with gay themes in them, hired straight actors for almost all of the lead roles here… to an effect which, like the movie itself, leaves people in different mind sets. But here is an overt gay agenda film that reaches past any specific agenda and manages to tell the tale of what one person can do in a relatively short period of time when they are focused on a cause they believe to be all-important. (Like Che, another 2008 miracle, the “real” politics sometimes get in the way of the message of the film, and the quality of the work gets lost in those bigger, historic disagreements.)

The Reader – Love it or hate it, The Reader found its place at the Oscar table via the ballots of the first group… not with a mega-marketing campaign… not with grand emotional appeals to the film being important for Jewish Academy voters… not with tricks and subterfuge. This is a small, independent film with a last minute change in the lead actress, made by a filmmaker who hasn’t done a film in a while, with an unknown young man in the co-lead role, pushed into this year by a big name whose company ha been suffering some rough times in the last couple of years. And it made it. While Geek World screams and cries about The Dark Knight not making the cut with Academy voters (cut to Tom Rothman’s great comment that he would take his award at the bank when he had a terrific film that did a lot of business, but didn’t get the Academy love), even those who don’t love The Reader should be excited that this little engine made it up the hill for, whether we concur or not, all the reasons we all claim all the time that we want films to find Academy love… for the film and not for the hype machine.

So…

Slumdog Millionaire is about as likely to win Best Picture now as Lord of The Rings, A Beautiful Mind, American Beauty, and Titanic were at about this time in the race. Everyone knows. Brickbats are flying. But a loss at this point would be a fluke.

And from my perspective, the film deserves the win. Why? Because it is a movie movie, the way the Academy and all Americans love movie movies. Does that really make it the BEST movie of the year? That is for each person to decide. And if you are driven by a certain aesthetic, the answer is most certainly, “no.” And God bless you and be well. Nothing wrong with that.

But Slumdog takes what the great Hollywood films does and in the great tradition of this town, turns it on its ear, keeping the clean, cool lines that are so familiar, but giving it a new coat of paint that feels fresh and exciting.

Just look at what has won Best Picture over the years. Yes, there have been No Country For Old Men, The Departed, Crash, Chicago, American Beauty, The English Patient, and Unforgiven, twisting the mythology of the “good guy” past the point of obvious tradition, though decades of WB hero-gangsters suggest that they weren’t too far from certain Hollywood traditions.

But look at the winners… Maggie Fitzgerald, Frodo, John Nash, Maximus, Will Shakespeare, Jack & Rose, William Wallace, Forrest Gump, Itzhak Stern, Clarice Sterling, Lieutenant John Dunbar, Raymond Babbitt, Pu Yi, Private Chris Taylor, etc, etc, etc…

The Academy loves the underdog story. Even in the darker films listed two paragraphs up… Tommy Lee Jones chooses old age over death in the end, Mark Wahlberg gets justice in the end, Roxie Hart overcomes her anonymity even if its just to be a famous dancing/singing murderess, Kevin Spacey dies after finding an internal peace, and Eastwood, not unlike Wahlberg, sets things straight in the end. (Crash and The English Patient… not really happy journeys.)

Of the four BP contenders other than Slummy, Milk, in spite of his death, has the only really upbeat ending, a positive legacy moving forward. Frost/Nixon and The Reader leave their star villains to their ignominy. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button ends with Hurricane Katrina coming and while touching, the dying tale told by a mother who has lied to her daughter for 40 some-odd years about her paternal history. This doesn’t mean that we can’t make the arguments for ambiguity a la Crash or The English Patient. But the odds are stacked against.

But more to the point… when you walk out of Slumdog Millionaire, humming or singing Jai Ho… dancing a little… talking about the kid and the outhouse… the death of a mother… the blinding of a child… trying to pronounce, “Chai Walla,” correctly, the beauty of Freida Pinto, the thrill of feeling like you are in a movie filled with darkness and danger only to be exhilarated by the power of fate and love in the end…

When I hear some people saying that Slummy will be like some of the Oscar titles that have not aged that well, I have to laugh. First, there is the arrogance of the dismissal of some of those titles. If Forrest F-ing Gump opened last month, it would have been associated with Obama instead of Reagan and swept the Oscars the same as it did in 1995. Maybe Reds and Raiders have more cultural weight than Chariots of Fire and Ordinary People did beat Raging Bull, but to kick the two winners from those two years because you prefer another one or two of the movies is not really fair or fair-minded. Chariots of Fire is a great movie. And they truly don’t make movies like Ordinary People anymore… and it was a lot better than this year’s attempt, Revolution Road. Both films were imitated and imitated and imitated to the point where the impact of the original faded into cliche’. But there is no shame in being the truthful source of the cliches of the future.

And after that first laugh subsides, I laugh again, because I think of the joy that I have seen in people after they have seen Slumdog Millionaire for themselves. And that is at least one big reason why we all love the movies.

Jai ho, y’all.

– David Poland
January 29, 2009

This is the shortest award season EVER!

It is also one of the most predictable years ever.

It is also the season in which coverage of the awards, from start to finish, jumped the shark into an Ouroboros parade.

It is also one of the weakest years, in terms of movies, in a long time.

The truth is, the field always narrows, there are always expected award players that turn out to be misses, and there are always a few big surprises… but on that last one, not this year.

I think the lack of surprise is a combination of certain surprise tricks no longer being surprising and the films that hoped to film that place just not being compelling enough to overcome the more expected films.

Really, the fact that The Dark Knight is looking like a locked in nominee – and has for a month now – is indicative of a weak field. It’s not a reflection of the film itself, but of the simple fact that a film like that just isn’t what the Academy tends to lean towards. People’s Choice Award? Absolutely. Oscar? Are you kidding?

Gran Torino is an example of a film that lives in a slot that was once a surprise and no longer is. “The Second Eastwood Movie” thing is in its second showing. Thing is, the only movie of the four that really did deserve a Best Picture nomination was Letters from Iwo Jima.

T2EM’s life and death was organic, starting with Mystic River making no splash at all at Cannes before becoming a strong Oscar player with an October release in 2003. Could Eastwood really have a 2004 Oscar movie too? Sure! Million Dollar Baby zoomed into a December slot after Eastwood made the “go” call in late October and not only was it nominated, it beat that year’s Scorsese shot at Oscar. How to top that? Two movies! Well… they were opposite sides of the Iwo Jima story, so there was some crossover. But the big, English-language one turned out to be well made, but uninteresting. And the little, late Japanese one that virtually no one who wasn’t a critic or a voter saw… your nominee.

Cut to two years later and it is like Clint’s Greatest Hits. Changeling goes to Cannes, gets the buzz that is now expected. And dies when landing on the Mystic River slot in October. Then the second film, no longer a “late entry,” but long scheduled to follow Changeling by two months or so, stars Clint, like M$B, involves Asians, like LFIJ, and has a karate kid, though this one is a young boy with no acting experience instead of the Next Karate Kid, Hillary Swank.

What is also true for the first time since Unforgiven is that Clint brings his iconography to the table and plays hard against it. How ironic – and a little horrifying – is it that Eastwood, who lost the Oscar he should have won for Unforgiven to what was pretty much a career-achievement award for Al Pacino, is now being pushed hard to be nominated and win for work that is undeserving by his own iconic standards. But even more so, that making this comparison would be unfair to Pacino, who is often mocked for his work in Scent of A Woman, but only because he created something so powerful that it was immediately the subject of everyone’s imitations. People love Clint growling, “Get off my lawn.” But they love it much the way they loved “Go ahead, make my day,” not because it was such a fine creation, but because it was so brutally direct.

There is some talk this season about Holocaust fatigue.

Nah.

But the standards are not quite as simple as “Dead Jews Win,” which is a horrible, yet often repeated line about the awards season. But Ed Zwick making serious, popular, and awards-lite movies is not new news. And The Reader, which caught fire as a possible contender primarily because of a fight between Harvey Weinstein and Scott Rudin that made it feel, for a moment, like Harvey was back in business. He’s not.

Then there were the front runners…. ah, the front runners.

I wrote about the danger of frontrunning six weeks ago and, indeed, Australia and Revolutionary Road died a BP death before they could open. And The Curious Case of Benjamin Button has done the job of getting a nomination. But try finding someone left who thinks it can win Best Picture.

We also have the great animated movie reaching for a Best Picture nomination that has only happened once… and never with an animation category available for voting. Wall-E is one of the very best films of the year, as was Finding Nemo… but no. The last run like this was with the documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11, which lost its tiny, tiny window when Bush won reelection in spite of Michael Moore not wanting him to do so.

You want a familiar, but silly stat that hasn’t come up yet and will in a couple of weeks? Ron Howard has never been nominated for Best Director and had the film nominated for Best Picture and lost. Why silly? Because the sample is just one film. A Beautiful Mind. His other nominee was Apollo 13, for which he was not nominated. (He won, however, the DGA Award that year.)

Even the leading nominees lack a certain sense of discovery. Danny Boyle is the only nominee never to be nominated for anything by the DGA or the Academy. David Fincher’s only nod from either group was a DGA win for commercials in 2004. Gus van Sant was nominated by both DGA and the Academy for Good Will Hunting. Christopher Nolan grabbed a DGA nod for Memento. And Ron Howard has been thrice DGA nominated, wining twice and Oscar nominated once, winning that time.

Will any lead actor be in any way surprising aside from Richard Jenkins, who has been a well known character actor forever? Same with Michael Shannon in Supporting?

Streep, Blanchett, Winslet, Scott Thomas… really? Does Anne Hathaway even seem like a surprise at this point? Viola Davis may well be the only unknown… virtually the only non-former-nominee in that group!

Look… I am really happy to see a lot of these people again. In the last couple of days, I have done four video interviews… with four people who I have sat down with either for past Oscar nominated work or earlier for their films this year under other circumstances. It was a great pleasure, but it’s not so much about new discoveries anymore.

I don’t know… it’s like the whole thing wants to regress back to an earlier form, perhaps not quite as owned by the studios as it was back in the day, perhaps still televised, perhaps in a bigger room. But it is supposed to be about the work. And it is all too easy to forget that.

One of my interviewees got very emotional today, talking about being in this special place at this special time. And afterwards, I talked to her about Mickey Rourke and how, even though you do get the feeling that he is a bit of a performance artist in interviews, I truly believe all the emotion he has been offering. After all, he gives this deeply emotional, pained performance and then, what? He is supposed to bottle it up? That is what we want from him? That is what we hope for? Whatever happened to an artist being an artist? Shouldn’t writers get that?

And that… that is the feeling we all want. We want to feel. We go to the movies to feel. To feel good. To feel bad. To feel excitement or fear.

In this too familiar year of awards, what is all this ennui about? We aren’t feeling it. And there is only one real solution.

Watch a great movie.

And maybe… maybe… leave Bill Condon and Larry Mark alone to do their work and to deliver an Oscar telecast that has a chance to surprise us. One can hope.

– David Poland
January 8, 2009

“Why aren’t these Oscar movies in more theaters?!?!”

New York Times… Variety… LA Times… yadda, yadda, yadda..

Worst of all, these are all veteran reporters who, if they don’t know it like the back of their hand as factual detail, should at least be able to smell the absurdity reeking from these stories.

It’s the marketing, stupid.

Year after year after year, we see the Oscar release strategy play out. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it fails. Sometimes the movies would have been better not being so precious. Sometimes the movies would die in a bloody heap if they tried to roll out any other way. Harvey Weinstein (and his now-42 West cohorts) were the best ever at it. But it has worked for others.

The massive disconnect, in my view, is that strategy is based on some specific goals… and then, journalists take a position on the tactics that come from the strategy without remotely considering what the real strategy is.

Why is Frost/Nixon still on just 205 screens? Because Universal knows that it may not become a big commercial hit and that anything that allows others to claim that it is, in any way “a failure” (fairly or not) could be damaging to the Oscar nomination that it is counting on for its wider release.

Of course, these strategies do change. But why would anyone change their strategy when it is working.

Why was Revolutionary Road held until Christmas? Well, the box office lightness of that film was a given under virtually any circumstance other than as an awards contender. So they waited until late and created a hammock story with that per-screen average scam. There was no better choice. What? Release the movie for Thanksgiving and see it gone by now both in theaters and in the awards push? Even the Golden Globes nods would have been threatened by weak box office and soft reviews in November or October.

The thing about releasing an awards chaser in September or October is that you have to be one of The Ones (No Country For Old Men/The Queen/Lost in Translation) or you have to have the undeniable muscle of a major star who is willing to work for four whole months for the film (Clooney) or you need to be a straight-forward box office success that then moves into awards contention (The Departed).

Miramax has owned the October awards release for the last couple of years. So why do you think Doubt launched in mid-December? Because it wasn’t that kind of movie. It was the kind of movie that might have gotten lost in the mix… just an actor’s movie… etc.

I’m not saying there is something wrong with Doubt by pointing this all out. All I am saying is that once you know what kind of cards you have in your hand, you know whether you have to play the cards or play the other people at the table. This year, Miramax is playing the table. Wait… plot… what’s vulnerable… what movie is slipping in December when they do their limited release… do people over 50 really want to vote for The Dark Knight… or do they want to vote for the movie about morality with two Oscar winners and both a once and future nominee?

Slumdog Millionaire got to $20 million on Monday. They are still on 614 screens. Searchlight has slowly rolled out into the places where a foreign language film with no stars is a problem. Some have worked. Some less so. But that $20 million mark puts them behind only Benjamin Button at the box office as the voters settle in. And they will surely use the Oscar nom to expand to a real wide release… just as they did with Sideways. But they are already wider than Sideways was pre-nom… and way ahead at the box office. The hope, I suspect, is that they will be over $30 million when the nominations come in and then expand and ride the wave to the second $100 million domestic film of Searchlight’s history… and the first Oscar win.

And what will be the big challenge of Phase II for Slumdog? Getting every Academy member to see the film in a good movie theater. They have The Great Movie, but now they have to fight off “not as great as I heard” and, though the film plays well on DVD, voters who are easily distracted on their couches.

In so many ways, Slumdog is this year’s The Departed… the popular favorite. The Departed’s vulnerability was that it was so violent. But its advantage was that it was popular, so a large percentage of Academy members had seen the film in theaters before the hardcore awards season had ever began. Slumdog doesn’t have that advantage. DVDs were in people’s mailboxes before theatrical release. It’s a movie without known stars. It’s a time shifter. It’s flashy. So the concentrated focus of being in a movie theater is an enormous benefit to the enjoyment of the film.

By the way… here are the nominees from the last four seasons that rolled out cautiously… same as this year…

Title – Release- Date it cracked 1000 screens

2007
There Will Be Blood – Dec 26 – Feb 1
Atonement – Dec 7 – January 18

2006
Letters from Iwo Jima – Dec 22 – never over 781 screens

2005
Capote – Sept 30 – Feb 3 (and only for one week)
Munich – Dec 23 – Jan 6
Brokeback Mountain – Dec 9 – Jan 20
Good Night, And Good Luck – Oct 7 – never over 1000 (803 screen top on Nov 18, lost 183 screens the next week and 929 for one week on February 3, lost 244 screens the next week)

2004
Sideways – Oct 22 – Jan 28
Million Dollar Baby – Dec 17- Jan 28
Finding Neverland – Nov 12 – Dec 31

Babel is another fascinating roll out. In it’s first 11 weeks, it went from 7 screens and a $55,621 per-screen to 35/$26,263 to wide on 1251 screens… and the one $5 million week of the film’s domestic life. The next week, it dropped almost 50% and started losing screens. By four weeks later, they were on under 250 screens, grossing under $500,000 a week, and would stay there until a post-nom expansion six weeks later. The film picked up about $13.5 million more on top of the $21.5 million that was already in the bank. But even with the nod and relatively few screens, they never saw a $2500 per-screen week after Weekend 3, aka the first wide expansion.

Also… there are a couple of big issues other than pure awards strategy in play… Money… and Ego.

As Babel shows above, it can be a long slog. And the reason why a per-screen of under $2500 for a movie making such a small gross is that it is expensive to maintain. Yet, if you have any hope of winning, you need to appear ongoingly “successfully.” So studios have learned to try to ride that wave instead of fighting it. We are seeing a wide variety of detailed strategies within that idea this year.

This brings me to the one movie that really does defy my basic notion of sane strategy in this season – which is not to say that I think all the others will work out well… just that they have a clear, reasonable logic – and that is Gran Torino. Warners is spending like it’s a wide release. The movie plays like a wide release. Yet, they are playing the release like an Awards-Only play. You may note that both of Eastwood’s last nominees used a similar strategy. However, this movie is not like either of the last two films, whatever you think of the films themselves. This is a Clint Eastwood movie, writ large. It’s his growl. It’s his stardom in play.

I went back to look at Unforgiven. It was an August release and cracked $70 million domestic in its first seven weeks. A commercial success, circa 1992. That is the strategy that Warners should have been using on Gran Torino. You can smell how much money they know is there in the ads. And they will go wide… a week from Friday. Huh?

The reality is that Clint Eastwood tells Warners how they are going to roll out his films. They don’t really get in his way. So I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that some in the studio were begging to go wide last week or earlier. When it does go wide, it will be probably be the #2 film for the weekend, behind Bride Wars, and probably close to the holdover number for Marley & Me. But my sad guess is that Eastwood left as much as $40 million on the table by holding out the film over the holidays. And while he may, somehow, find his way to a lifetime-achievement Oscar nod for one of his weaker performances, the film has zero chance at Best Picture. So… ego.

And with due respect to Ed Zwick, Defiance could have been a commercial movie. James Bond fighting Nazis – which is not the reality of the film, but like Valkyrie, could have been sold that way – has some box office weight. But not dumped out by an overtaxed, budget-nervous studio forced to release your film in time for awards. Defiance would have been a movie that could have benefited from the slot that Valkyrie was once moved into, President’s Day weekend. Strong marketing. Limited distractions at the studio. And heavy on Bond in the woods.

But Zwick has had big success, commercially, in the awards slot… the last time with Mr. Cruise as The Last Samurai. And once he and his team thought they were scheduled into the awards season, being pushed out must have felt, understandably, like a slap in the face. I get that. As with all things, the strategy is given by the goal. And the goal of that last minute release… as much not being slapped in the face and not wanting to sell the movie as something it is not as anything else, I suspect.

I know there are people who want to see the buzzed movies. Even when they are in towns beyond the biggest cities, they are often on a very limited number of screens, making them harder to see even when they seen nearby.

This Week’s Charts To Come…

– David Poland
December 31, 2008