Hollywood Life Magazine

Asides

• Maybe you don’t want to read another think piece on why the Oscars don’t matter.  But here is another one, this from economic standpoint. And I suppose that argument could be made.  In my continuing conversations with Boxoffice.com’s Phil Contrino, however, he insists that the Oscars do matter, even money-wise. Sure, it’s been a long time since the top of the box office was reflected in the Oscar race, and it’s been a long time since going to the movies at all was a regular adult activity, but Oscar buzz can make the difference between someone seeing your movie and not.  It matters to actors who still want to do great work and have to find projects that enable them to do that, and most of them can’t and won’t put on a superhero outfit and dumb it way down for the target demo.  It matters for writers/directors who still have something to say.   In their own way, the Oscars are keeping the quality of film alive, even if they don’t get it right every year.  But they should stick to ten movies or go back to five.  Ten ensures more popular and diverse selections get in.  Five makes it a more exciting race (unless they pick bad movies).  Anyway, here’s investigative reporter Edward Jay Epstein on the Oscars:

  How do the Oscars fit into Hollywood’s scheme to reclaim their profits? The Oscars have less and less to do with Hollywood every year, and that’s been going on for the last decade. It’s more like the Independent Spirit Awards—the movies being nominated aren’t the studios’ movies, because you can’t nominate Harry Potter or a comic book sequel except for best effects or makeup, which doesn’t matter. The Oscars are not what Hollywood does, the Oscars are what Hollywood pretends it does. Back in 1950, Hollywood really did make those movies, movies for adults, those based on books.

  Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a perfect example: the book is doing fantastically, but the movie will make no money whatsoever. It’s good for the book industry, good for the authors, good for the directors and actors, but it has nothing to do with the business of Hollywood. Harvey Weinstein could win five awards, and next week his company could go bankrupt, because there’s no connection between the money flow and the honors.

  So Hollywood releases Extremely Loud in October with minimum audiences—the major audiences are in the summer, that’s where you get your $100 million opening weekends. If you bring out a Batman or a Spiderman or a Harry Potter, there’s enormous audience awareness. But if you bring out a movie like Ides of March, it isn’t a sequel and you won’t have the audience to open it on thousands of screens. As theaters move toward digital distribution, which will allow movies to open on as many as 30,000 screens at a fraction of the cost, it means studios will move even further toward comic books and sequels.
  So what’s the continuing appeal of the Oscars?

  It’s debatable—the [TV viewing] audience has shrunk over the years, I think the Grammys audience is bigger than the Oscars audience now. People want to see the outfits, what the women wear on the red carpet, they want to see the celebrities and the host’s opening routine, but most moviegoers haven’t seen any of these [nominated] movies. That’s why they expanded the Best Picture field from five to 10 movies. But almost no one in the U.S. has seen the foreign films—they don’t even have to be shown in the U.S. to be nominated—and no one in the world has seen any of the short films—I don’t think anyone in the world would know where to find them. Then you have these 10 Best Picture nominees, and 95 percent of the country hasn’t seen them, except maybe for the Steven Spielberg picture.

  Fact checking for Mr. Epstein – The Help is the only movie the country has seen — with a profit of $165 million, The Help trounces the competition.  War Horse hovers at around $70 million.  Ditto The Descendants and Moneyball.  The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which they failed to nominate, made $100 million.  But it’s not the Spielberg picture.  It’s The Help.