Shhhh. Hear that? It’s the sound of “buzz” building.
As we head into the Hollywood awards season, culminating at the Oscars on March 5, the struggle is on to revive memories of movies from early this year, float the fortunes of this movie or sink the chances of that one, separate the wheat from the shredded wheat.
That struggle plays out in ads in trade magazines Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, and in the early awards from critics’ groups, but the initial rounds are in the trenches, online.
“The Net is definitely pushing the buzz faster than print these days,” says veteran Hollywood journalist Jeffrey Wells, whose site, Hollywood-Else where.com, is in the vanguard of online movie chatter – “The first thing I go to every morning,” says Washington Post film critic Ann Hornaday.
Tom Ortenberg, president of Lions Gate Films, backs this up.
If Tom O’Neil of Goldderby.com, now a part of TheEnvelope.com, or Dave Poland of Movie City News and The Hot Button, lauds a movie, “it helps keep a title out there, the profile of the film high during awards season,” says Ortenberg, whose studio has big hopes for “Crash” and “Grizzly Man,” among others.
Though “the most important thing” is film quality, Ortenberg says little things – like getting the cast of “Crash” on “Oprah” in October, six months after the film hit theaters, weeks after its DVD release but just before the first critics’ awards come out – “keep that attention high.”
To gauge this success, check Oscar-watching Web logs.
Worried that “Crash,” a sleeper hit last spring, is forgotten? Or that “Hustle & Flow” won’t win Terrence Howard Oscar props? Go to Hollywood-Elsewhere.com, where Wells punches up frequent reminders.
Sci-fi and fantasy fans go to Ain’t It Cool News (aintitcool.com) or Dark Horizons (darkhorizons.com). For horror, horror.com. Film buffs also prowl sites like the Internet Movie Database (imdb.com) for detailed credits on movies past, present and future (soon to be joined by Turner Classic Movies’ database-in- progress, tcmdb.com). Pro and amateur reviews are at rottento matoes.com or metacritic.com. There’s Movie City News (mov iecitynews.com) among many others, for film news, fandango
.com for tickets.
The hipper side of the Hollywood gossip crowd goes to de famer.com or thesuperficial
.com for gloves-off treatment of Tom Cruise, Ashlee Simpson and everyone in between.
And Oscar fanatics can go to Hollywood-Elsewhere.com, os carwatch.com, TheEnvelope.com (run by the Los Angeles Times), the “Weeks to Oscar” countdown on Movie City News or The Hot Button (the hotbutton.com), both put together by David Poland.
The influence of these sites, says Poland, is their ability to yell, “Look under that bushel!” and influence “just three or four of the ‘right people.”‘
Web buzz can lead to print buzz, or more important, recognition within the marketing department of a studio that it has a possible Oscar contender, which can be worth millions in box office and DVD sales. Buzz leads to decisions to push ads.
Ortenberg sees the Net buzz as being crucial to the position he sees “Crash” having, “as really, the movie that established itself, early in the year, as an awards-season contender, just sitting there waiting for other films to join it.”
“My first review of Charlize Theron in ‘Monster,’ calling her a prohibitive favorite to win the Oscar, didn’t win her the Oscar or a nomination. But it got people to get excited about looking at the performance” says Poland, who can “publish” early, without waiting for space in a newspaper or the opening date of a movie.
Poland takes credit for putting nominee Djimon Hounsou on the Oscar radar for 2002’s “In America.” Overall, “Net buzz is way overrated,” in the bigger scheme of publicizing films, but he and others are only out to “influence about 20,000 people.”
If those people are “in the business” and are convinced “Brokeback Mountain” “is the movie to beat in the best picture race” (Wells says), or if Uma Thurman’s a near-sure nominee for “The Producers” (Poland), or if Sandra Bullock should be pitched as a nominee for “Crash” (oscarwatch.com), the Net truly has become the player in the Oscars.
