Oscar News: Popular Film Category

[Meera of Tarth]

On 8/10/2018 at 12:56 AM, Risto said:

Exactly. And also creates a lot of problems for entire industry and even us as consumers. Do movies even need to be good? Do Marvel, DC or Disney need to put up a good movie? Shall we see the likes of "Twilight" or "50 shades" in this category? Instead of aiming for the Oscars with movies that can't be ignored by awarding bodies, we get this. 

Academy does embrace popular movies. Two blockbusters hold record for most Oscar wins and when someone does a great job, they do tend to nominate them. And not just in peripheral awards. Last year, "Logan" was nominated for its script. Matt Damon was nominated for "The Martian". I am sorry, but whoever claims that Academy is not recognizing popular movies already, is really not paying attention.

Agreed.

And what worries me the most is the type of movies that could be popular. It's not the same, for instance, having "Wonder Woman" or "The Martian" than those two you mentioned. Seriously, those are awful. (Well, I have to admit that if one watches Twilights as a parody of vampires it has its hilarity). 

[Winterfell is Burning]

11 hours ago, SpaceForce Tywin et al. said:

You guys are making much to do about nothing. A recently deceased family member of mine was a voting member, and he described the process as an absolute joke. It’s just a combination of a popularity contest, trading favors and future networking. Many of the members don’t even bother watching a lot of the nominated films. I know this because I would get my great uncles copies, unopened. This new category is just a way to highlight the films that make the studios money while trying to draw in a younger audience.

Everyone knows that...but at the same time an Oscar nomination or win can make careers and earn movies tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars, so it ends up being important, even though it shouldn't.

[Spaßvogel]

Slowly evolving into the Kids' Choice Awards. I think the Razzies have more integrity than the Oscars.

[Mladen]

4 hours ago, Winterfell is Burning said:

Everyone knows that...but at the same time an Oscar nomination or win can make careers and earn movies tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars, so it ends up being important, even though it shouldn't.

True. How many of these small independent movies were saved from "falling down into nothingness"? Getting Oscar nomination isn't just about prestige, it's also a huge financial deal. People tend to go and see those movies. 

Even here in Serbia, every year we have a film festival with those movies - Oscar nominees that didn't get released in cinemas. It is a wonderful opportunity to watch those movies and see that Hollywood is not just about superheroes.

1 hour ago, Spaßvogel said:

Slowly evolving into the Kids' Choice Awards. I think the Razzies have more integrity than the Oscars.

The problem is that people care about Oscars. At the end of the day, no one cares about Screen Actors Guild Award or Golden Globe. People care about Oscars. And when you allow public opinion of liberal California to be deafening, you have a lot of problems. When two, three years ago we have problems with acting nominations and the lack of African American nominees, people blamed Academy. We needed Whopi Goldberg to remind us that this is not Academy's problem, but actually industry's. You can't award what is not there. And whoever said that, like poor old Charlotte Rampling, got vilified.  Instead of returning the ball to the studios' corners and asking them why aren't more African Americans in the movies, we got debate about gold statuettes.

And now same thing happens. Instead of Academy clearly saying "No, they don't deserve to be nominated" we get this. The worst part is that some circles in Academy hoped for "Black Panther" nomination that would solve two problems - the lack of African American nominees and the popularity issue. Unfortunately for them, "Black Panther" proved to be mediocre movie undeserving of possible Oscar nomination. So, the conundrum continues and ABC/Disney/Marvel came up with the perfect solution. For them. Not for Academy, not for the viewers, not for anyone, as for that matter. Just for them.

[Liver and Onions]

So I had to double check this, but unless Wikipedia is lying to me, Star Wars was nominated for Best Picture in 1977. If I had to debate that choice, I'd support it, arguing that as a sci-fi/fantasy film, it made its outer space setting, sentient robots, space monks, and hero's journey plot feel very real and fun. 

I personally don't care much about the Oscars these days, but it does seem like this is a move to draw in people who want to root for their favorite crowd-pleasing film. And yet regardless of the quality of this hypothetical movie, if it's popular, this award may take away its ability to get the prestigious "best' picture award. So if Titanic were up for these future Oscars, could it win both popular and regular best picture awards? Is that allowed under these new guidelines?

It does bring the Best Animated Picture category to mind. It's creating another perceived second place spot for something that, viewed objectively, might deserve the top win.

But truly I don't much care about the Oscars, right? 

 

[Ran]

8 hours ago, Liver and Onions said:

So if Titanic were up for these future Oscars, could it win both popular and regular best picture awards? Is that allowed under these new guidelines?

That's what they say, that a film can be in both categories.

Funny about that year, 1998. Three of the five nominated films were in the top 10, all five in the top 50. Besides Titanic, As Good as It Gets and Good Will Hunting were in the top 10. When I mentioned the coarsening of culture, it's not something that's happened very gradually over fifty years. It's something that's happened rather more quickly, and over the last couple of decades. Audiences voting for bread-and-circuses -- err, paying to watch VFX beat 'em ups -- is what's led to this situation where people can talk about good films as being "niche". 

[Mladen]

Let we look at the money v quality Academy awarded since 2000.

2000 - Gladiator wins Best Picture. Gladiator is the second highest grossing movie of the year. Of five nominees, all 5 earned above $100M on box office.

2001 - A Beautiful Mind wins the Best Picture. On Box Office, movie earns $313M. Of five nominees, LOTR: FOTR earned the most money, being the second highest grossing movie of the year. The other three weren't so lucky, with only Moulin Rouge earning more than $100M

2002 - Chicago wins the Best Picture. On Box Office, movie earns @303M. LOTR: TTT  was the highest grossing movie of the year and a nominee for Best Picture. The other three nominees all earned above $100M.

2003 - LOTR: ROTK became the second highest grossing movie in history, second movie to go above $1B, winning 11 Oscars, including Best Picture. All four other nominees earned more than $100M.

2004 - Million Dollar Baby wins Best Picture, grossing $216M. All 4 nominees earned more than $100M, with The Aviator earning the most among nominees with $213M.

2005 - Crash wins Best Picture, earning $98M. Only two movies out of five nominees grossed more than $100M - Brokeback mountain and Munich.

2006 - The Departed wins Best Picture, earning $291M. Four out of five nominated movies earned more than $100M.

2007 - No Country for Old Men wins Best Picture, earning $171M. Two other nomineesS - Atonement and Juno earned more than $100M.

2008 - Slumdog Millionaire wins Best Picture, earning $378M. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button also earned above $300M. The only other nominee that was above $100M was The Reader.

2009 - The Hurt Locker wins Best Picture, earning only $50M. Academy expands the pool from 5 to 10 nominees. Two nominees, Avatar and Up were among Top 10 highest grossing movies, with Avatar being highest grossing movie of all time to this date, earning $2,7B. Up earned $735M. Of other seven nominees, two went above $300M - Inglorious Basterds and The Blind Side, and one earned more than $200M - District 9. Lastly, only one other nominee earned more than $100M - Up in the Air.

2010 - KIng's Speech wins Best Picture, earning $414M. Out of nine other nominated movies, two were among Top 10 highest grossing movies of the year, with Inception earning $825 and Toy Story 3 (being highest grossing movie of the year) earned slightly above $1B. Out of seven other nominated films, four grossed above $100M, with Black Swan earning more than $300M, True Grit and The Social Network earning more than $200M and The Fighter earning more than $100M.

2011 - The Artists wins Best Picture, earning $133M. Out of eight other nominated movies, one earned above $200M - The Help, while 5 earned above $100M - The Descendents, Hugo, Midnight in Paris, Moneyball and War Horse. 

2012 - Argo wins Best Picture, earning $232M. Of other eight nominees, one - Life of Pi, earned above $600M, two earned above $400M - Django Unchained and Les Miserables and two movies earned more than $200M - Lincoln and Silver Linings Playbook.

2013 - Out of nine nominees, 12 Years a Slave wins Best Picture, earning $187M. Only one nominee cracked Top 10 of highest grossing movies of the year - Gravity with $723M (being n. 8). Of other six nominated movies, one - The Wolf of Wall Street got above $300M (almost closing to $400M). Two movies - American Hustle and Captain Phillips earned above $200M. Philomena earned $100M.

2014 - Birdman wins Best Picture, earning $103M. That year, Academy nominated 8 movies. Out of seven nominated movies, one (American Sniper) earned more than $500M, one movie, The Imitation Game, earned above $200M and two other earned more than $100M - The Grand Budapest Hotel and The Theory of Everything.

2015 - Out of 8 nominated movies, Spotlight wins Best Picture, earning $98M. One nominated movie made the Top 10 highest grossing movies of the year - The Martian with $630M (being n. 10). The Revenant earned more than $500M, Mad Max: The Fury Road earned above $300M. Two movies earned above $100M - The Big Short and Bridge of Spies.

2016 - Out of 9 nominated films, Moonlight wins Best Picture, earning $65M. La La Land earned more than $400M, two movies earned more than $200M - Arrival and Hidden Figures, and two other movies earned more than $100M - Lion and Hacksaw Ridge. 

2017 - Out of 9 nominated films, The Shape of Water wins Best Picture, earning $195M. One nominated movie, Dunkirk, earned above $500M, one, Get Out, earned above $200M and three earned above $100M - Darkest Hour, The Post and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.

The bottom line is that we can't call "niche" a movie that is earned above $100M. And given the list, it is not like Academy awards unknown films. They don't award highly popular movies, yes, but it is not like they haven't awarded those when deserved. Not to mention that this list only focuses on movies that got Best Picture nomination. If we also count movies being nominated for Best Directing, Script, Actor and Actress, or fully expand, we will see that it is not like popular movies are not present during their award season. 

[dbunting]

I think they would have been better off to do like some of the other award shows. Best Drama, then add Best Action/Sci Fi and Best comedy  and maybe still have Best Picture as the top prize?  I think most peoples issue with the award they added is "popular". That term is generally associated with generic movies and music.

Of course most people would rather nothing changed 

[Cas Stark]

Based on that list, things started to go really sideways less than 10 years ago, that sounds about right, with the decline and the variance from popular v. academy worthy ballooning since then.  I thought expanding the best picture category to ten was stupid and I stand by that, this new idea is even stupider.

[Fez]

5 hours ago, Risto said:

The bottom line is that we can't call "niche" a movie that is earned above $100M. And given the list, it is not like Academy awards unknown films. They don't award highly popular movies, yes, but it is not like they haven't awarded those when deserved. Not to mention that this list only focuses on movies that got Best Picture nomination. If we also count movies being nominated for Best Directing, Script, Actor and Actress, or fully expand, we will see that it is not like popular movies are not present during their award season. 

With rising ticket prices, only $100 million is actually getting close to being "niche." The average movie ticket price this year is up to $9.14, which means that a $100 million domestic box office movie was seen by a bit under 11 million people in the US. This is a bit simplified, since some movies are more likely to be seen in 3D or IMAX which are more expensive, others in second-run theaters, which are cheaper. And some movies are more likely to have repeat viewers. But since attendance numbers are not as readily available, its the easiest way to make apples-to-apples comparisons.

11 million is a lot of people, and a TV show with 11 million viewers would definitely be a hit these days, but it doesn't mean its actually a cultural touchstone. That's around what the medical drama The Good Doctor on ABC gets each week, and how many people actually care about or talk about that?

By contrast, in 2000, the average movie ticket price was $5.39, which means a $100 million domestic box office movie that year was seen by over 18.5 million people.

Or, in 1985, when Back to the Future, Rambo Part II, and Rocky IV were the biggest hits, the average price was $3.55. Back to the Future made $210 million domestic, which means it was seen by over 59 million people (almost 25% of everyone in the US at the time). The closest box office to that in 2018 is Solo: A Star Wars Story, which made $213 million domestic and was therefore seen by a bit over 23 million people (just over 7% of everyone in the US today).

$100 million doesn't get a movie the same cultural cache it used to have. Its the movies making $300 million+ that are still the big tents, and while you're list has a few of them getting nominated/winning Best Picture, they are few and far between.

[Mladen]

3 hours ago, dbunting said:

Of course most people would rather nothing changed 

I don't know many people who are seriously following Academy's work that would claim that. Simply, there is a need for some improvements and modernization. It needs also to get more diverse. But simply, these changes can't happen at the cost of artistic integrity.

2 hours ago, Cas Stark said:

Based on that list, things started to go really sideways less than 10 years ago, that sounds about right, with the decline and the variance from popular v. academy worthy ballooning since then.  I thought expanding the best picture category to ten was stupid and I stand by that, this new idea is even stupider.

Yeah, I would agree with that. The issue is that Academy doesn't realize that the approach to TV has changed. The ratings are no longer indication of popularity and simply the way we watch TV has changed. 

1 hour ago, Fez said:

With rising ticket prices, only $100 million is actually getting close to being "niche." The average movie ticket price this year is up to $9.14, which means that a $100 million domestic box office movie was seen by a bit under 11 million people in the US. This is a bit simplified, since some movies are more likely to be seen in 3D or IMAX which are more expensive, others in second-run theaters, which are cheaper. And some movies are more likely to have repeat viewers. But since attendance numbers are not as readily available, its the easiest way to make apples-to-apples comparisons.

That is true, but also with streaming, torrent downloads and early DVD releases make movies far more available than it was 10 or 15 years ago. Just like we have changed the way we watch TV shows changed, the way we watch movies also changed. Family movies like superhero adaptations or animation movies have the advantage there but overall, and this has been talked about many times on forums, we have started watching only blockbusters in cinema. So, it is a bit more complicated. 

But, yeah, I do get that $100M is getting closer and closer to being niche.

1 hour ago, Fez said:

$100 million doesn't get a movie the same cultural cache it used to have. Its the movies making $300 million+ that are still the big tents, and while you're list has a few of them getting nominated/winning Best Picture, they are few and far between.

Certainly, but it would also be wrong to say that those movies (that earned $300M+) are ignored. There are 15 Best Picture nominees that earned $300M+ (out of 71 movies) since 2010. And that is only one category. 

I feel as this was the good opportunity to talk about making popular movies better. But, it seems it is a missed opportunity. We should really talk why, in God's name, these movies are less and less interesting to the Academy. And why they have become just crowd-pleasing features and not something serious cinephiles would enjoy.

[Fez]

Follow-up: The new category won't be at the next Oscars.

 

The Academy says creating a new category nine months into the year "creates challenges for films," and says they want further discussions and inputs from their members. I suspect the category will never see the light day.

[Ran]

Thank goodness.

[Cas Stark]

It shows how reactionary the Academy has become, announcing huge changes and no idea what they're doing.

[lokisnow]

Yeah I knew this would be walked back.

believe it or not the academy has always been somewhat populist simply because the majority of people who come to Hollywood to work here come because of popular films.  Your extreme outliers like Scorsese may appreciate the art, but most come for the spectacle.

now of course they learn to defend their profession by valuing the “artistic” hence the existence of “awards season” since the inception of the awards, but this is not a body that could be relied on historically to vote for la confidential over titanic.

so why the huge swing the past decade to ever more “in the bubble” artsy movies winning?

One the expanded nominees means they get nominated in the first place, little movies used to rarely get nominated.

second the expanded nominees creates more oppurtunities in instant runoff voting for surviving each round.

if one little movie of five nominees got nominated, like il postino, instant runoff will likely have that nominee eliminated first or early, but in an expanded bracket, with instant runoff, votes from eliminated similar candidates can quickly accrue and advance films like this.

and then post LOTR, studios simply stopped doing screenings and distributing screeners of big films. The force awakens had about twenty screenings and zero screeners, moonlight had about a hundred screenings and fifty thousand screeners. From the perspective of those who vote based on the availability of screenings and screeners which is almost all voters), blockbusters simply do not exist. They have zero presence.

And finally smart phones happened which put all voters online all the time, rather than simply engaging with the internet in a once a week ritual of checking their email themselves. Now they can google things themselves all the time! Not just their assistants, they could do it too!

And that ability to use the internet by voters coincided with the explosion of  boutique awards trackers, aggregators and punditocracy, which was virtually non existent outside of the trades pre LOTR. This press cohort universally excluded popular films almost 100% of the time from their charts, which had a feedback loop reinforcement cycle that vastly narrowed the field to only the films they were including in their predictions trackers  (to be fair, they only include films that awards publicists are hawking to them, they don’t do much research themselves).

i mean the last time an acting award had a surprise occur in nominations was tommy Lee jones in 2006, and there are twenty nominations a year! That’s how extremely the field has narrowed.

the actual solution the academy needs is simply a concerted effort by studios and publicists and press to support popular films in awards season as much as they support the little films, if they did the academy would quickly revert to its historic mean of including a fair amount of popular films in its nominees.

 

 

 

[Ran]

It's not that "ever more artsy" films are winning. It's that "artsy" films were also popular films. There's a massive difference between The Graduate and Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and it's the fact that one is a classic film with a great deal of artistic merit, and the other is a crowd-pleaser at a time when crowd-pleasing is very, very easy to do.

The culture has changed. Mature, thought-provoking, or challenging works are now almost by default not in the running to be popular works unless (as with Dunkirk) they manage some sort of epic cinematic spectacle while they're at it.

 

[Mladen]

Praise the Lords... 

I would agree that it seems that Academy is truly lost these days. Unfortunately for them, all the problems of the industry seems to have become Academy's problems. As hilarious as it is, it does seem that Oscars do matter. At least for dumping all the problems on them

1 hour ago, lokisnow said:

i mean the last time an acting award had a surprise occur in nominations was tommy Lee jones in 2006, and there are twenty nominations a year! That’s how extremely the field has narrowed.

That is because we now have so many precursors that it is practically impossible to become surprised. And all of them measure themselves by how accurate they predict Oscars. 

 

[lokisnow]

4 hours ago, Ran said:

It's not that "ever more artsy" films are winning. It's that "artsy" films were also popular films. There's a massive difference between The Graduate and Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and it's the fact that one is a classic film with a great deal of artistic merit, and the other is a crowd-pleaser at a time when crowd-pleasing is very, very easy to do.

The culture has changed. Mature, thought-provoking, or challenging works are now almost by default not in the running to be popular works unless (as with Dunkirk) they manage some sort of epic cinematic spectacle while they're at it.

 

Nah, as pointed out above mature thoughtful challenging works like the revenant make half a billion dollars, that is sufficiently popular for me to say that such modern fare is as popular as mature thoughtful challenging aged fare like a cougar and kitten fighting over a lazy Dustin hoffman. 

I’ve watched all the best picture nominees (nearly 600) and Oscar has always had artsy and popular films side by side since the parallel wins of wings and sunrise. They tend to veer between one and another pendulum style over the years, since lord of the rings there has been a strong swing away from the populist films but I actually think they’ve been swinging back to the center for a couple years now.  (Birdman was probably peak artsy and the pendulum is trending overall the other direction now)

The academy is just over reacting to two of the artsy films winning in back to back years. But given the way the academy straddles both populist and art films it is a problem that in our  current golden age of blockbusters we’ve been enjoying for the last five years, that these films (which are some of the most popular films of all time reaching unprecedented simultaneous global audiences) have been locked out of the acknowledgement that usually comes to the best of such films or sometimes to crappy films. For example, Towering Inferno got a best picture nomination (amongst others), but better acted, directed, and written blockbusters today are more or less non existent in achieving he same peer recognition

[dbunting]

I just think it's funny how they reacted to bad ratings by creating a pop award, then reacted to getting lambasted by taking back the pop award, just a bit reactionary. 

[Ran]

10 hours ago, lokisnow said:

Nah, as pointed out above mature thoughtful challenging works like the revenant make half a billion dollars

See what I said about Dunkirk and spectacle. Revenant is a $135 million dollar film, a survival epic with action sequences, noteworthy VFX, and all that. The Graduate it ain't. Kramer vs. Kramer it ain't. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, it ain't.
Look over the top 10 grossers for the last fifty years, and dramas without substantial action and VFX work become rarer and rarer as time progresses.