March 26, 2003

Still logy…

Even Variety seems as thick as a Peter Bart diatribe.  His comedy stylings of last week included a scolding of Frank Pierson for even considering putting some reins on this year’s ugliness… without ever acknowledging that the profitability of Variety is absolutely reliant on Oscar spending by studios. 

Of course, the irony was that Oscar voters did their part in putting a plug in The Harvey Show. (Jeffrey sat this one out.)  Whether Harvey gets that message… whether Harvey is capable of getting that message… or if he will instead humiliate Anthony Minghella with the excess of this last season is the question.  Miramax insiders will tell you – over and over and over again – that the most extreme acts come directly from the big man himself.  He gets worked up and no matter what he is advised, he pulls out those big guns. 

I also object to the mythology of studios, desperate to get back in the Oscar game.  It is said that Warner Bros.’ announced art division is nothing but an Oscar bait division.  Well, people like being part of the awards season.  They like winning even better.  But the truth is simple.  You have to have the movie to sell.  And then, you have to decide what kind of win you are after.

This year, DreamWorks saved itself tens of millions by deciding, ultimately, that they were on a wild goose chase with Road to Perdition and Catch Me If You Can (each of which got more Oscars than Gangs of New York).  Yes, they had trade print ads.  But seven-figure weekly budgets for a television ad push is where it gets insanely expensive. 

Last year, Miramax hit a wall with The Shipping News, which never got an Oscar run going and ended up grossing $11.4 million domestic, eating much of the profit from the surprise nominee, In The Bedroom.  Sony considered a hard push for Black Hawk Down, but it never happened, in spite of the solid box office success.  The effort for Ali died with the box office failure.  New Line’s push for Lord of The Rings: Fellowship of the Rings was real, but relatively muted.  Paramount ran a lot of print ads for Vanilla Sky, but seemed to know early that they were out.  Disney took good care of The Royal Tennenbaums, but they saved a few dollars where they could also. 

Two years ago, I recall a conversation with a high-level Fox exec about Cast Away… $250 million domestic box office was all the award he needed. 

And so I suspect it will be in the future.  Bart is right about one thing, for most studios, Oscar is about money.  And once again this year, only one film really got a bump from the awards.  I believe that Chicago would have been a $110 million film without the awards push.  There is a good chance that the cost/profit ratio on the film will not reach beyond the added cost of the campaign until home video.  But the investment paid off.  On the other hand, the expense of Gangs of New York’s campaign will never be recovered.

And there is the problem.  Chasing Oscar at these prices is not a great business.  The Last Samurai will probably be a $100 million-plus movie before even the earlier nomination balloting of 2004.  Lord of The Rings: Return of The King will definitely be.  Theoretically, Master & Commander will have played out before the nomination voting.  Same with Universal’s comedy dup of Richard Curtis’ Love Actually and the Coen Bros.’ Intolerable Cruelty.  And obviously, summer release Seabiscuit will have galloped in or out of the race by August. 

Peter Pan, Cold Mountain and The Alamo are all set for Christmas, but will be forced to show themselves by Thanksgiving to get into the awards game. 

The you have the Nicole Kidman Problem, featuring Cold Mountain, The Human Stain and Dogville to go with this year’s Oscar win.  Minghella is always a good bet.  Human Stain director Robert Benton hasn’t been a serious Oscar player since 1984’s Places In the Heart.  And who the hell knows what Dogville is going to turn out to be.

And then there are the movie movies… Fox Searchlight’s In America… Jane Campion’s sexy In The Cut… Sony’s recently-moved-into-December Mona Lisa Smile, which is loaded with female stars, upcoming and otherwise… Focus Features’ currently date-free duo of original productions, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and 21 Grams… DreamWorks’ House of Sand & Fog from first-time director Vadim Perelman and based on a novel by the son of the man who wrote the novella, In The Bedroom… and who knows what else from Miramax and the other indies that still have Cannes to chew over.  (Remember, The Pianist was Focus’ first buy, less than a year ago.)

After all of that, Miramax is still the only company that seems likely to be relying on their particular brand of awards period releasing to turn Cold Mountain into a $100 million grosser.  MGM and Paramount do not seem to have Oscar movies for next season at this point (who knows what Bingham Ray, Ruth Vitale and David Dinerstein might come up with in the meanwhile).  Every other studio seems to be seriously in play. 

But at what price?

How much will Warner Bros. spend on The Matrix films, which will at the very least be in serious competition with sister company New Line’s Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King for tech honors.  Tom Cruise looks to be in the Oscar chase in WB’s The Last Samurai, although Ed Zwick’s last couple of films have turned up short come awards season.  (As I recall, one film’s awards failure was a major disappointment for Fox under Bill Mechanic’s regime.) 

Expect New Line to show financial restraint again, but this time, they will have the full attention and participation – presumably – of Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh and the rest of the gang.  Expect clever over cash.

Disney will have to figure out whether The Alamo is really an Oscar movie. 

Fox will have a thick book on Master & Commander before deciding whether they really want to invest another $20 million in the late December/January nomination corridor.

Universal has the most complicated process ahead, positioning Seabiscuit as The Summer Movie That Can, deciding whether the Coen Bros. film can be ridden to anything more than acting nods and/or a writing nod.  Love Actually is being driven down the Four Weddings & A Funeral path, which could be for real.  And they are going to have to read the tea leaves on Peter Pan.  (It doesn’t help that PJ Hogan has Unconditional Love in the can and still unreleased by New Line.)

But still, the films that are really going to benefit by Oscar runs are on that “movie movie” list.  Which once again brings us back to Focus and Screen Gems and Searchlight and Miramax and maybe big Sony and DreamWorks. 

It’s as easy to imagine a Best Picture race looking like:

Cold Mountain
The Last Samurai
Lord of the Rings
Love Actually
Seabiscuit

…as it is to imagine:

In America
In The Cut
Intolerable Cruelty
Lord of the Rings
21 Grams

…or:

Cold Mountain
House of Sand & Fog
Lord of the Rings
Mona Lisa Smile
Seabiscuit

And, of course, there has to be at least one title that I haven’t even considered yet.

My point is, we don’t really know what next year’s awards will look like.  All we do know is that there will be more room for screwing around than usual, because change creates some degree of chaos.  The critics awards will be all jumbled up, but more important than ever.  Hopefully, the Golden Globes will become less of a primary. 

By moving a month earlier, the Academy has just saved tens of million of dollars for studios.  And in the process, probably will cost some movies tens of millions of dollars.  Definitely cost the trades more than a million. 

It’s going to be a lot of fun to be in the middle of that history…

READER OF THE DAY:  THE HIGH CLASS MCMUFFIN writes:  “One of the upshots I take from this year's awards is that it would appear that what pundits call the form book is proving unreliable.

For the past few years, the Hollywood Foreign Press have been jabbering on about how accurate they are in anticipating who will win the Oscar. So much so that one would be forgiven for thinking that they consciously select the nominees and ultimate recipients so that they are consistent with the Academy. It is as if the alignment validates their existence. But the fact is that with the main categories including two subsections (Best Comedy or Musical, Best Drama etc.) they are covering as many candidates as possible.

The Academy's decision to bring the ceremony forward and thus shorten the campaigns is seen by some to combat the growing discomfort with the manner in which those campaigns are managed (and indeed, this year as you pointed out, it would appear that many of the Awards' recipients were for films that did not campaign that aggressively). However, I think there is another agenda at play here (and one I wouldn't be too disturbed by if it were true). The Academy is flexing its muscles to quash the other wannabe awards and throw a spanner in the works of all this "indicator" nonsense.

Which brings me back to my original point about the form book. So often we have been told that only five times has the DGA ... and the SAG winners usually ... and the Globes ... The Globes if anyone needs reminding is made up of the Hollywood Foreign Press. Just how many of those liggers are members of the Academy? And even if all of them shared that same constituency, surely their number is so small as to amount to little more than a ricocheting hormone in Catherine Zeta-Jones' advanced pregnancy. It would appear then that those claims are built increasingly on sand.

To wit: The DGA: In the 54 years the DGA has been running the awards, on 49 occasions the Oscars has chimed in. But from those five instances, it has happened three times since 1996. Ron Howard (DGA) Mel Gibson (Oscar), Lee (DGA), Soderbergh (Oscar), Marshall (DGA) Polanski (Oscar).

This year, Nicholson won the Globe, Day-Lewis the SAG and Brody the Oscar.  Renee Zellweger won both the Globe and the SAG while Nicole Kidman got the Oscar. Same as last year : Russell Crowe (Globe and SAG) and Denzel Washington (Oscar), Sissy Spacek and Nicole Kidman won the Globes last year while Halle Berry won the SAG and the Oscar. What about Madonna for Evita and Brenda Blethyn's Globe for Secrets and Lies in the same year that saw Frances McDorman win the Oscar for Fargo? Similarly, Annette Benning won the SAG for American Beauty while Hillary Swank won the Oscar for Boys Don't Cry. And they are just for performances in a leading role. The supporting roles are even more off the charts.”

A VOICE IN THE DISTANCE writes:  “I thought that Adrien Brody was a disgrace. First of all, he planted a long kiss on Halle Berry's lips despite the fact that she did not invite him to stick his tongue down her throat. It was very excruciatingly obvious that she was unpleasantly shocked by his taking liberties with her. Second, the guy mumbled about a bunch of incomprehensible ideas before grandstanding the Academy orchestra--what, does he think that just because he was an upset winner that he gets to disregard the 45-second limit imposed on everyone else??? Finally, if he's really against war, why is he friends with someone in the military? That his friend is in the military is an indication that his friend believes that sometimes, war is needed to end the wrongs in the world (i.e. the fascist aggression of Germany, Italy, Japan, Romania, etc. during WWII). Instead, Brody seems to think that his friend is in the military for unspecified reasons and that his friend is in the military against his free will.

Then there was Michael Moore, who herded all of the documentary feature nominees onto the stage even though at least one of them was so distraught by the gesture that he left the show immediately following Moore's incoherent rant about "fictitious" things.  Bush's presidency and the war in Iraq seem pretty real to me.  Personally, I disagree with Bush's reasons for attacking Iraq, but I think that toppling Saddam Hussein is a boon to the world.

For me, the only wins worth cheering on Oscar night were the ones for Peter O'Toole (a truly great man) and for Nicole Kidman, who despite having suffered so many indignities and sorrows, not only has refused to commit crimes (unlike Roman Polanski) but has managed to blossom her artistic and personal endeavors. Nicole Kidman's speech defended the idea of freedom better than anyone else's--that, despite outside pressure, we must continue to behave as if our freedoms have not been curtailed. May she achieve additional glorious heights during her lifetime.

You know what's really brave? Telling a crowd of misinformed hippies that it's okay to fight. Without fighting wars, there would be precious few Jews, Koreans, Vietnamese, and maybe even Chinese left because of the Nazis, the Blackshirts, and the Tojo-ites. Also, please someone tell Susan Sarandon that the V sign stands for Victory, not peace.

By the way, I'm not a right-winger--believe it or not, I consider myself a liberal.”

And THE BOOKWORM writes:  “Now that Roman Polanski has accepted one of our country's most distinguished awards surely he can also accept our punishment, too? Seems only fair. After all, he's evidently earned them both. By the way, do you think Hollywood actors realize that they're only aiding and abetting a fugitive from justice by continuing to appear in Polanski's films? These films earn him money and that money allows Polanski to continue living a comfortable lifestyle abroad. This guy's the Alex Kelly of the film industry and the actors and execs who work with him are like the family members who sent Kelly money so that he could continue skiing in Switzerland rather than coming home and paying for his crime. Say, how come Interpol won't arrest Polanski anyway? It's not like he can't be found.”

E ME:  Without defending Polanski (as Robert Evans remarkably did on Jimmy Kimmel Live), I do want to point out that Polanski had a deal with the L.A. D.A. for time served and left only because the presiding judge was heard to claim that he was going to reject the plea bargain and give Polanski a 50-year sentence that neither the D.A. nor the victim wanted.  Furthermore, the judge later said that he had the result he wanted… Polanski out of the country.  As for Interpol, France refuses to extradite for this particular crime.  Regardless of how you feel about his illegal act, to compare him to the kid who fled the country after being convicted of rape is not a fair comparison in my opinion.  The system was prepared to leave Roman Polanski free to lead his life.  Not so with Alex Kelly.

Anyway… do you see 2004 as a studio year at the Oscars or an indie fest?