You want horrifying?
Katherine Hepburn.
Yeah, that image is in your brain now.
There’s a nice episode of Extras were Ricky Gervais’ Andy is an extra in a Kate Winslet Oscar-bait movie. Kate’s playing a nun who helps Jews escape the Holocaust in a blatent play for an Oscar nomination. Three years later Winslet got her Oscar after playing an illiterate ex-SS camp guard in The Reader…
Someone posted hereabouts awhile back that THE KING’S SPEECH has to be the iconic one: a period drama where our hero needs to overcome his disability to win WWII thanks to his budding friendship with someone from a different social class who plays the Wise Outsider Teaching Valuable Life Lessons.
And . . . there it is.
THings have definitely changed, and for the past decade, the Oscars have been increasingly similar to the indie Spirit awards.
But for many, many years, I said that the perfect formula for winning an Oscar would be to combine
- An earnest liberal script by Stanley Kramer, and
- Cinematography by David Lean
For years, the average Oscar voter was someone like Gregory Peck- politically liberal but artistically conservative. For such voters, the perfect film was a period piece with beautiful costumes and sweeping lanscapes, in service to a safe, conventional liberal message.
I think an essential component of Awards bait is pedigree, which can take several forms (not mutually exclusive):
- A cast and director that has a strong Academy history (wins/nods)
- Based on an already established (preferably “classic”) literary work
- Inspired by a notable historical event or figure, preferably with large production values
Note that this entire discussion is independent of whether they’re any good or not (critical approval is very important but not always essential)
This year, the obvious examples are Lincoln, Life of Pi, Anna Karenina, Les Miserables, The Hobbit, and The Sessions
Some are on the cusp (Argo, Silver Linings Playbook, Flight, Zero Dark Thirty, Django Unchained, and The Master) but there’s still enough that doesn’t quite dovetail with this pedigree factor to make them certain slamdunks for likely awards consideration.
That’s why it’s easy to look back at some films in retrospect and label them “awards bait” (Crash, Brokeback) when I’d argue they weren’t much. “Issue” movies don’t usually have the same impact with the Academy without the pedigree attached to it, and neither of those casts had any real award history going in. Certainly, Good Night and Good Luck, Capote, Memoirs of a Geisha, Cinderella Man and Munich were all more obvious Oscar bait candidates that year–though none ended up getting the industry love that those two did.
Awards bait is obviously a reductive term, and for some pejorative. When I use it, I don’t assign intent (though clearly, it’s probably in the back of the minds of some studio heads, filmmakers, and actors) as much as a more obvious combination of categories that make award-attention more likely.
I think sometimes, people assign importance based on this pedigree element, since the weight of history or cultural association comes with it. I admired the Spielberg film enormously this year, but I think Moonrise Kingdom and Beasts of the Southern Wild are both better films. But neither falls into clean Oscar categories nor do either have the “gravitas” that comes with history, politics, war, disability, or substance abuse that often help assemble an awards-friendly (though by no means foolproof) formula.
Sometimes, a respected, successful director gets shunned by the Academy for so long that he feels compelled to make a certain KIND of movie that he hopes/ believes will appeal to the voters.
As I’ve noted before, for many years, the Oscars tended to go to movies with:
- Exotic or historic settings
- Lush, sweeping landscapes
- Period costumes
- A dramatic story (preferably based on either real events or an acclaimed novel)
- An earnest, conventional liberal message.
Comedies, science fiction, gritty urban movies with cuss words, action movies, kiddie movies… they were pretty much anathema to Oscar voters, no matter how good the movies may have been.
In the seventies, Eighties and early Nineties, guys like Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and Spike Lee made some very good, highly acclaimed and very popular films that didn’t win Oscars. Now, in theory, a successful and wealthy artist shouldn’t CARE bout silly awards… but in reality, they usually DO care, tremendously. And sometimes, such artists respond by making the kinds of movies they THINK the Academy likes.
Note: I am NOT saying the following movies were bad- merely that they appear to me like blatant pandering to the Academy by directors who wanted to win Oscars.
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Martin Scorsese saw the gritty crime drama Goodfellas lose out to ***Dances With ***Wolves, a movie that had almost all of the elements I mentioned above. I honestly believe that’s why he made The Age of Innocence, a movie wholly unlike most of his other works. I think he was trying to give the Academy what he thought they wanted. It DIDN’T win any Oscars, but it sure looked like Oscar bait to me.
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Steven Spielberg’s ***E.T. ***lost out to Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi, a movie with ALL of the elements listed above. The perception was that Speilberg made kiddie movies, and he concluded that he had to make a SERIOUS movie based on an Important Novel, if he wanted to win an Oscar. ***The Color Purple ***didn’t win him any Oscars, but it was definitely intended as Oscar bait.
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Spike Lee’s intimate, gritty portraits of ghetto life didn’t get him the Oscar (or even the nominations) he wanted. Hence, he amde the kind of epic he thought would garner more respect. Malcolm X was Spike Lee’s idea of what the Academy wanted.
This is why it’s problematic to make such sweeping statements about the Academy. All of these types of movies have recently won or been nominated for Best Picture in the past decade:
Comedies: The Artist, Midnight in Paris, Juno, Little Miss Sunshine (and that’s not including dramedies like The Descendants and The Kids Are All Right)
Science fiction: Inception, District 9, Avatar
Gritty urban movies with cuss words: The Fighter, The Departed, Crash, Gangs of New York
Action movies: The Hurt Locker
Kiddie movies: Hugo, Toy Story 3, Up
If you think that Malcolm X wasn’t a deeply personal project for Spike Lee, you don’t know very much about the man or his work.
Actually, I think a perfect way to define successful Oscar bait is to look at films that won, but then dropped off the radar.
A Beautiful Mind (which won over LotR which is still watched and discussed and loved). Dances With Wolves . Last Emperor. Amadeus. Gandhi. Annie Hall. And, I predict- The Artist.
But that’s all completely subjective. I love Amadeus and still watch it frequently, and I know plenty of people who do the same. My one of my best friends considers that one of his top 10 favorite movies ever. Annie Hall shows up all the time on greatest comedies list (and I can’t even see how that could be considered awards bait in the first place). The other movies all have plenty of fans out there. No movie ever truly “drops off the radar,” especially after it’s won Best Picture.
An ideal Oscar bait movie should have at least a subplot about the performing arts.
Note that astorian specifically said, “for many years, the Oscars tended {note the past tense} to go to movies with…”
I agree with you (and I suspect that astorian might, as well) that, in the past 10-15 years, those rules-of-thumb have become less iron-clad.
Exactly so- as I noted, the Academy’s standards have changed tremendously in the past 10-15 years. All kinds of movies that USED to win awards no longer do, and all kinds of movies that used to be shunned now get serious award consideration.
Removing crime/gangster films from that list (since they’ve got a rich winning tradition) and calling HURT LOCKER what it is (a war movie), there is only one winner in this list: THE ARTIST (proving about once a decade, a comedy can win)
The truth is genre films (thrillers, westerns, sf/fantasy/horror, kid films) are often the bridesmaids but rarely the bride. Westerns had a 55+ year dry spell at winning before DANCES. LOTR was the first sf/fantasy film to ever win. SILENCE the first suspense and/or horror film. Of course they’ll rake in craft/technical awards, but the formula still is weighted heavily to prestige films. Musicals, historically, have been the only significant genre exception.
Look at the Sight & Sound Top 10 list this year. What were the top sound American films? VERTIGO (thriller), THE SEARCHERS (western), 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (scifi), none of which got any real Academy love in their time, though the Kubrick came closest. Genre has credibility and respect in hindsight, but very rarely can outshine a prestige project (war, period, melodrama) in the here-and-now.
It’s unquestionably personal, but it’s also one of his most conventional films, which does feed the speculation (nothing more) that it was an opportunity to immerse himself in a project that he cared about, while also trying to cater to the Academy’s more middlebrow tastes. That doesn’t mean it’s bad (I like the film, and most of Spike’s work, in fact), but it does follow formula more rigorously than most of his films. And interestingly, that was the last film of his to win any nominations at all.
I’m not going to ascribe strict causality to astorian’s well-argued examples, but the fact remains that Spielberg only started winning Oscars when he took on more “serious” subjects. That despite overseeing numerous amazing performances, Cronenberg actors only started getting nominated when he abandoned horror for crime films. That it took two literary adaptations to put David Fincher on the Oscar map, even though the punch-drunk kineticism of his earlier films was what made him unique.
Oscar loves a formula, an assembly of elements that are still heavily weighted to the familiar over the innovative, the respectable over the irreverent, the comfortable over the new. While there still remain outliers to this pattern, these cycles still exist and recur.
Gandhi may have had all your 5 elements, (and I agree it’s an Award Bait movie) but that doesn’t change the fact that it was a far better movie than the sacchrine-laden E.T, in every way, bar special effects.
Other than The Wizard of Oz has an out-and-out children’s film ever won Best Picture?
I agree. I think there are movies that are quite good, but get more nominations and awards than they otherwise would have (“other things being equal”).
When a movie has a subplot or “meta” level that relates to the performing arts (especially movies or plays) then it just appeals to the Academy voters in particular. Examples include Shakespeare in Love, Tropic Thunder, Hugo, and The Artist.