..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Kim Voynar
..Michael Wilmington

17 WEEKS TO GO
Why We Award

When the Academy Awards started in 1929, there were only 270 people in attendance. Hollywood awarding its own was a real thing. In 1947, the awards were broadcast for the first time. Television came aboard in 1953. But when ABC took over the show in 1976, the network really prioritized the product and it really became the flashy world event that it is today.

1996 was the first year that The Golden Globes appeared on NBC and that's the same year E! started its live red carpet coverage with Joan Rivers. And at the Academy Awards the year after that, Miramax would win its first Best Picture Oscar for The English Patient.

The stakes were high back then, but the fever really started getting hotter every year since then. There is now an entire industry built on the Awards Season.

The media thrives on the chase. The L.A. Times is so anxious to make awards advertising attractive to the industry that they built an awards website this year, theenvelope.com, and have resorted to such stunts as giving the Weinstein Company a free double truck print ad this October. Television networks make a ton on the overspends on TV spots that awards season demands, with even programming decisions, like placing American Idol on Thursday instead of Tuesday, based on the amounts studios will spend on advertising that night as movies open Friday. The awards season is bread & butter to MCN as well.

The biggest print players in the media during the awards season are Variety and The Hollywood Reporter. Neither trade paper could maintain their current operating budgets (or come close) without the awards season. Not only do they make that vast majority of their annual advertising revenue in these five months, they have both made the Special Edition business into a cash cow.

So whether it's the Hollywood Film Festival, AFI Fest, National Board of Review, Golden Globes, Broadcast Film Critics, LA Film Critics, WGA, SAG, DGA, PGA, Indie Spirits or one of the many other events over these months, you can be sure that the trades will be cashing in as only they can do. And any one of these events can generate hundreds of thousands of dollars for the trades, from FYC ads to Congratulations all around, so working with each event is critical. Hell, Variety has even made screening movies into a cash generator, letting the studios pay for the cost of screening at the Arclight while the sponsorship dollars go directly to the Variety bottom line.

But these events are just as interested in finding the spotlight as the trades and TV networks are interested in providing one. Most groups use these year-end awards events as their primary way of raising funds. Studios buy tables for the events at which they are being honored, which pays for the event and pumps up the operating budget for most groups. Some groups find creative ways to spend the overage, as LAFCA did last year by funding and fronting a showing of films that they felt had been overlooked at the American Cinematheque. HFPA makes so much money from NBC's rights purchase for the Golden Globes that they both make charitable donations and sponsor every member of the group on a maximum of three fully paid trips to film festivals anywhere on the globe each year.

Some of the critics groups have happily kept their events untelevised. But the power play has long been based on TV. HFPA's Golden Globes moved around and on and off the channels for years before settling onto NBC with producer Dick Clark. This last year, the Academy, which moved into the Kodak Theater, designed as the home for the awards, had multiple pre-shows fighting for space on the red carpet. They then forced all coverage off air while ABC held the first half-hour of the official evening, before the show started, for its own pre-show… generating more money.

When the Academy had to make a decision about whether to hold the Oscars in light of the start of the Iraq war a couple of years ago, the decision was made as much by ABC as by AMPAS. In the case of the Oscars, the amount on money made on the awards is so large that it would be crippling to a vast number of AMPAS programs to miss a year of being successful television programming.

The BFCA (a group of which I am a member) has become just the third awards show to have a broadcast network show, though the network is a small one, the WB. And the next show of honor would be live pre-show on E! and others. And those pre-shows would be the kind of promotion that builds the network show. And on and on and on… one hand lubing up the other.

And how will the BFCA event really know it's arrived? When the studios start doing after parties near the event location, spending more money on self-celebration.

All of these organizations feed off the same tit.

We can mock National Board of Review all we like. Their membership is neither made up of industry members, nor are they publicly named. Every year, insiders tell stories about how a very small group of members decide how to hand out the awards. Horror stories about backdoor deals on catering as some particularly slimy members skim off the top have gotten the attention of the NY State Attorney General.

But how do their early announcements manage to carry weight? The media treats them as though they matter. Even cynical, tough-minded Oscar watchers treat them like they mean something, even as they roll their eyes during any conversation about NBR. So what are "real people" to think? They think that NBR means something!

And as time has passed, NBR's absurdly early nominations have become closer and closer to the mainstream. Why are all the awards groups now announcing their nominations in early December? Well, for all the hemming and hawing, there can be no debate. They ALL want to be seen as influential. After all, membership in all groups complain every year about having a reasonable chance to see and consider all of the year's films before voting, especially with the load of "awards hopeful" product arriving between November 15 and December 7, both in screenings and on screeners. But do we all wait until January 1… when the year is actually over… to start the nominating process? No. Academy members have more than a month to vote for nominations after all the non-guild groups have made their nominations public in mid-December.

What's the rush?

Well, the majority of groups seem to want to nominate before the Oscar nomination balloting closes, this year, on January 21 and invariably give away their awards before final ballots go out.

This year, it goes… NBR winners announced on Dec 5 or 6, LAFCA winners announced on Dec 10, BFCA Nominees announce on Dec 11, NYFCC winners announced on Dec 12, HFPA nominees announced Dec 13…

A break…

But during this break, hundreds of Top Ten lists come out, earlier and earlier each year, along with the actual theatrical release of no fewer than a dozen award hopeful films…

…PGA & WGA nominees announced Jan 4, DGA &SAG nominees announced Jan 5, BFCA Critics' Choice Awards on Jan 9, Golden Globes on Jan 16, Oscar Nominee balloting closed on Jan 21, PGA Awards on Jan 22, DGA on Jan 28, SAG on Jan 29, Oscar nominations announced January 31, WGA on Feb 4, final Oscar ballots mailed Feb 8, BAFTA on Feb 13.

Of course, there is even greater insanity. Film Independent announces its Independent Spirit Award nominees on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, more than a month before year's end. And ironically, these are the nominations that are least in need of an early berth, since the actual awards are not until the day before the Oscars.

Indie Spirits are on cablecast on the NBC/Universal-owned Bravo network… they has Special Issues in both the Hollywood Reporter and Variety… sponsorship deals have become a major part of the event… and studio Dependents have a dominant position on the organization's board, which has been a big part of influencing the ever-growing cap on how much an ISP nominee can cost to produce, as the Dependents use the awards as a marketing tool. Everybody wets their beak.

AFI Fest, which along with Hollywood Film Festival, is one of the places to launch a film in Los Angeles as we go into awards season, has become so demanding of people who want to take advantage of the opportunity that screening at the festival can even keep studios from screening films for industry groups before they play the fest. But small studios value the tool. And the trades get their taste. And the AFI gets to raise money and look important. And they actually show some good movies too. But do any of us think that's really the point anymore?

It is a laugher to read criticism of any awards groups or local festivals in which films are launched or awards are given by any of the media outlets that derive a direct fiscal benefit from these events. If you are Variety and you want to pick on the Hollywood Film Festival for some mysterious process of decision making, you probably shouldn't be selling "Congratulations" ads to every studio in town and leaving your magazine on every seat of the awards show. Ironically, one of the events that seems to have the least traditional infrastructure underneath is also is one of the more honest events about itself. Studios pay for tables after talent is selected for awards. Some studios with just an award or two buy many tables. This year, one studio that won a few major awards involving some of their major awards talent paid for just one table… and so it goes. But no one is putting a gun to the heads of the studios. As long as the studios see promotional value to the event, it will remain as successful as it has been. And as long as a big part of the awards season is turning heads as often as possible, that value will probably be there.

On a gut level, it seems absurd to compare the legitimacy of the HFF's award show to the Oscars. But when you think about it in a rational way, it is not that much of a reach.

The legitimacy of the Oscars are not, in the end, the power of the Academy, but rather the fact that the awards are given based on a sample of more than 5000 voters who are all in the industry. HFPA is less than 100. BFCA is less than 200. Indie Spirits are voted on by many people (some say too many) but the nomination process goes on with small groups in small rooms. (Filling a room with smoke in L.A. will get you arrested these days.)

Even within the Academy, the categories where committees instead of mass voting determine nominations are always being criticized. Since the final voting is always a popularity contest anyway, maybe it is time for Oscar to offer two awards, one for docs and foreign language features that had America releases on more than 10 or 20 screens and a committee-based nomination process for those that have not.

But the illusion that the group of 5000+ plus are not regular folks who are subject to the same - if not more sophisticated - manipulations that Hollywood mavens use to sell, say, Saw II is just that… an illusion. Peer pressure, which can be measured by box office amongst other things, is real.

In the end, it is all just Hollywood recognizing its own. One movie of the twenty or so films that are seriously campaigned every season (seriousness measured in dollars). It has become rare that more than one or two make enough extra money to make up for the expense of the campaign. But the power of ego in Hollywood makes the Enola Gay seem minor.

And there is, to use an analogy to Eugene Jarecki's doc, Why We Fight - hoping to be short-listed for a Best Documentary Oscar and to be released by Sony Classics, reviewed on THB - a standing awards army in Hollywood. And standing armies tend to motivate awards war because, heck, you have a standing army waiting around to do something!

Why do we award? Because we must.

Because if we didn't, we'd have to do something else… like going to see movies for the joy of the form or to stimulate thought or just as part of getting laid on a Saturday night. No more pundits, no more ads, no more consultants, no more free lunch…

And the next thing you'll tell me is that agents and managers will end up running a major studio…

Silly.

 

Oscar Charts
Picture
Director
Actor/Supporting Actor
Actress/Supporting Actress
Original/Adapted Screenplay

18 Weeks To Oscar
19 Weeks To Oscar
20 Weeks To Oscar
23 Weeks To Oscar
31 Weeks To Oscar
2004 Oscar Columns

- Email David Poland