Millions of cynical Davids around the world love to load up their slingshots against the Goliath that is the Oscars, lobbing their pea gravel in the form of endless complaints.
The wrong movies get nominated. Prizes are bad for art. Hollywood is corrupt, selling its soul to get on the free-DVD mailing list. The TV show isn’t as popular as it used to be.
But the Oscars matter more than ever. To you, to me, to the moviemakers, the actors, the TV producers, the Wall Street financiers, over to and including the line worker plopping a blank DVD into a copying machine for the pending release of “Letters From Iwo Jima.”
For the Oscars are just the tip of a growing iceberg of movie artistry and economics. Since this is Hollywood, let’s mix our metaphors and pound them home: Tonight’s Academy Awards are the engine of a sleek worldwide machine – they are the straw that stirs the drink of the film industry. They mean an indie movie can help a previously nominated actor land financing; a Golden Globes show that attracts 20 million TV viewers; the next 30 years of cable movie festivals. None of this happens without the late- winter glitz-fest at L.A.’s Kodak Theater.
“It’s an enormous enterprise” that the Oscars prop up, said Anne Thompson, deputy film editor of The Hollywood Reporter and a student of the Academy Awards for decades. “Movies need promotion. Movies as a whole are not neccessarily a secure and safe prospect going forward. The industry needs anything that keeps them healthy.”
Lots of eyeballs
If the answer to “Do the Oscars still matter?” is an emphatic yes, then we deserve more arguments why. Here’s one: The $1.7 million ABC will charge for each 30 seconds of advertising during tonight’s long telecast, second on the calendar only to the Super Bowl’s charge of about $2.6 million. More than 93 million people watched the last Super Bowl, but the Oscars are the only thing close, at 38.9 million U.S. viewers last year. Those $1.7 million checks represent a wave of commerce and jobs, from filmmakers to toothpaste manufacturers.
“There’s still a huge number of people who watch and base their decisions on what to see on what happens at the Oscars,” said producer Dave Noll of City Lights Media Group. “There’s a small percentage of people who do try to rise above ‘the Oscar thing,’ but that always leaves the huge percentage who do care.”
Noll has other concrete examples of how far the Oscar influence pushes down into the movie food chain. His firm produced “The Ten,” an indie with a star-powered cast bought by ThinkFilm for $4.5 million after a good showing at Sundance this year. Oscars “are a part of the thought process” for indie producers, Noll said, whether they can boost their profile by landing a previous nominee for their cast or launch a character actor into award contention.
In Noll’s case, “The Ten” is a “comedy for college kids,” not at the caliber of “Little Miss Sunshine” or “Sideways,” he said. “Yet we had a brief Oscar discussion on the music in the movie,” he said, including “how can we position the music” for a possible nomination.
Still slinging pebbles at Giant Oscar? More arguments come from Doug Thomas, the DVD page editor at Amazon.com.
“Look at our top 10 today,” said Thomas, speaking late last week. “Babel.” Two versions of “The Departed.” “Borat,” preordered. “Little Miss Sunshine.”
“And movies like ‘The Queen’ and ‘Babel’ are the kind that will be seen primarily on home video,” Thomas said. The Oscars are “a second boost for films, and the home market is now bigger than the theater market,” he said.
Thomas used to work at a video rental store, and an Oscar tag always works with older films. “It’s the time of year you put out the past winners, and films like that get another second chance,” he said.
For art’s sake
Last but not least, Thompson wants to argue the Oscars actually do promote the arts, not just the cash flow.
“There’s a reason to aspire to the Oscars, because the rest of the time, the studios are only about making money, believe me,” she said.
“At the Oscars, Clint Eastwood (best-director nominee for ‘Letters From Iwo Jima’) and Ryan Gosling (best-actor nominee for the little-seen ‘Half Nelson’) can coexist. Remember, Clint had to fight for making ‘Mystic River’ and ‘Million Dollar Baby,’ before they were nice to him and let him make ‘Letters From Iwo Jima.’
“If that Oscar gold wasn’t there, those movies might not get made.”
Reach Michael Booth at 303-954-1686 or at mbooth@denverpost.com
Five tweaks for the Academy Awards
Here are five things we’d like to see change on the Oscar broadcast:
1. Here’s hoping Ellen comes up with something new, not a rerun of her Emmy hosting gig. So, no sitting in the audience, running around backstage, interviewing technicians. Make us laugh like Billy Crystal.
2. Enough with the Chuck Workman montages. We love film clips. We crave tributes. But try a contest in film schools; enlist the talents of YouTubers to create cheeky but loving reels; pay some film geek to juice them. Our pick: Quentin Tarantino.
3. Oscar has come a long way since Rob Lowe and Snow White, but we still want more ambitious musical surprises. Or just Prince. Tonight, Al Gore should do a duet with Melissa Etheridge on the nominated “I Need to Wake Up” from “An Inconvenient Truth,” complete with a PowerPoint presentation.
4. Reading may be fundamental, but when presenters are glued to the teleprompter, it’s fundamentally awful. How hard is it to get your guests comfy with a script that last mere seconds?
5. After Mary J. Blige read the phone book at the Grammys, we’re glad to hear Oscar honchos are trying to ban thank yous and send honorees to a backstage “thank-you cam.” Will it work? Doubt it, but it’s worth trying.
