Posted on 11/30/2022 9:12:04 AM PST by Rummyfan
There was a time when Oscar heat meant big bucks at the box office, when Oscar talk would boost a movie no one was paying attention to into profitability and beyond. Again and again, what was known as the “Oscar effect” would kick in, and cash registers would clang.
Why?
Well, believe it or not, there was a time when the Oscars were trusted as an imprimatur of quality, a reliable signal of something special, and as guaranteed bang for the hard-earned buck.
As Oscar talk increased in intensity, interest and box office receipts would grow. Hey, look at all the nominations/wins/talk. This must be a movie worth seeing.
...
Well, those days are behind us.
Here is the domestic box office for this year’s titles enjoying the most Oscar talk.
Till – $8.7 million
The Banshees of Inisherin – $7.9 million
TÁR – $5.1 million
She Said – $4.3 million
Triangle of Sadness – $4 million
Bones and All – $3.8 million
The Fabelmans – $3.5 million
Armageddon Time – $1.9 million
Aftersun – $756,000
Top Gun: Maverick and Everything Everywhere All at Once might be nominated, but their status as box office successes had nothing to do with Oscar talk. If anything, it’s the other way around: their box office success won them some Oscar heat.
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
Reopening between now & Christmas for 2 weeks....
Merit and quality filmmaking no longer mattter.
A movie where the man is innocent? Look at this movie from Denmark. Very good.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunt_(2012_film)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieLIOBkMgAQ
Good take, although even though with the acknowledgement of Bacon, SIL still shows Will, quill in hand, burning the midnight oil sweating out the revamp of "Romeo and Juliet".
Cant stand Cruise but loved the movie
I think it’s a good movie also.
I’ve heard it was Harvey shenanigans too but I was never sure .
Top Gun 2 was a great story, clean and shows what a good story and characters can do at the Box, once upon time it would have been up for about every Oscar there is. Even the Bond movie, No Time To Die, was great sand should have a chance.
The Oscars have long made themselves irrelevant.
I have looked at the release schedule, not one film I care to see under any circumstances, except one and I may go see it Sunday and is the Santa Movie, Violent Night, I need a laugh and some escapism. Had a tough week, my beautiful companion of 27 years died Monday and I need to get out of the house.
I assume you meant 2012 not 2021 for Argo
We only see one movie a year on average. We saw The Fabelmans last week. Good film. Well done with good acting. Spielberg waited until his father died at 103, I believe, to make it.
For a while, anti-Vietnam vet/War movies seemed to be the movies with the message the Oscars were advancing.
When I was really up on movies I could sometimes just read a summary of a film not yet made and know that it would be at least nominated, because of its politics/message.
“Till.” SMH. God forbid the true story of what that boy actually did was told, as well as the story of how his own father raped and murdered a woman in Italy as a G.I. in WWII and was hanged for it. Sigh.
I’ll check that out.
I felt exactly the same way about the last Emmy Awards show that I caught. I watched a bit of it and was a little shocked that I did not know ANY of the nominees who were getting nominations and awards. Too many streaming channels to keep up with.
FWIW:
CODA won Best Picture last year. A genre film? Yes; it’s a cute coming of age story with a happy ending. It worked because it had a fun twist, because the deaf actors were hilarious, and because Emilia Jones turned out to be exactly the right actress at exactly the right age in exactly the right role. That is a pretty good recipe for movie magic.
An all time great movie? No, but let’s not quibble about that. It’s enjoyable, definitely non-woke, funny, and eminently watchable.
That said, the subject posed here is wokeness destroying the Oscars. IMHO, CODA won precisely because it WASN’T woke. And the cultural politics were probably an important factor.
CODA premiered at Sundance, where it was an audience favorite. The sometimes correct conventional wisdom is that it was released too early to sustain its initial buzz long enough to stay in Oscar contention. But CODA just kept chugging along. Several other later releases generated plenty of buzz and CODA dropped way down in the Oscar speculation sweepstakes. But it somehow kept chugging along as an honorable mention.
By the time the Oscars rolled around, however, The Power of the Dog had emerged as the critical favorite among the people who pay a lot of attention to such things. CODA’s win was a considerable upset. So what happened?
I think the support for CODA was an intentional backlash against wokeism. Not everyone in the film industry is crazy. Sober people in the business are worried about streaming swallowing the whole industry. Aside from the spandex movies and TGM, the theatrical box office continues to struggle. The sober people have to understand that freakshow novelty, however popular it may be with jaded critics, turns off a lot of the general public. And sober people surely understand that out of control wokeism is alienating a huge part of the potential viewer base.
As the Oscars approached, The Power of the Dog had had a rainbow coalition pride parade prancing around it for much of the year, and the sober people balked. Insulting the viewers is not a good marketing strategy. I suspect that a fair number of Academy voters were looking for a way to push back. And there was CODA, the frontrunner in the non-woke lane.
Not everyone in Hollywood is crazy, and at least some people want a major course correction.
Personally, I thought CODA was the best choice available, with Drive My Car being my #2. But Drive My Car, which did win for Best International Feature Film, was (1) foreign; (2) a foreign language film dependent on subtitles wherever it was shown, because it flips effortlessly between Korean, Japanese, Mandarin, English and Korean Sign Language; and (3) very much a high concept arthouse film intended for a niche market. By contrast, CODA was entirely mainstream.
The Oscar was awarded to a film for normal people. It is worth seeing if you’ve not seen it yet. As is Drive My Car, which will surprise you.
Score one for the normies. Not everyone in Hollywood is crazy.
I know that people freak out that Citizen Kane lost to How Green Was My Valley.
I have never seen Citizen Kane; but, I watch, and rewatch, How Green Was My Valley. In fact, Hubby and I watched it Thanksgiving evening this year. It is a fine film. It's not like it was junk or something. It is a good movie.
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