The perennial award circuit carousel.
The context behind the campaigns.
"It helps to know what distributor is behind it and how likely they are to do a good job.”
— Anne Thompson, on predicting Oscar nominations and wins.
The French film “Anatomy of a Fall” (Anatomie d’une chute) was one of my favourites from 2023, and what I thought would be a shoo-in as France’s official submission to the Academy Awards. That is how the foreign language film category is populated: eligible non-English films are selected by national committees, leaving one film to represent their respective countries.
This year there was a total of 89 films submitted to be winnowed down to the 5 nominees. The shortlist of 15 that all voters should watch is out now, and France's actual pick made that cut. So perhaps their skipping over Anatomy wasn't such a terrible choice.
All is not lost for Anatomy’s nomination chances, however, as it is being championed by US distributor, Neon, who previously did well with “Parasite.”
So far, Anatomy has collected some Golden Globes nominations in addition to winning the top prize at Cannes and the European Film Awards--with bonus directing, acting, and writing wins from all over the world. It follows the same blueprint as last year's “Triangle of Sadness,” which secured Best Picture, Director and Screenwriting nods, but with even more wins and nominations, and the awards season is far from over.
Film festival accolades are relevant because of how the festival circuit directly feeds into the Awards circuit. Sundance and Cannes are a bit early for campaigns to start, but can be good bellwethers for studios on what might be worth investing in.
With September comes the trifecta of Venice, Telluride, and Toronto-- that's when the Oscar race starts in earnest. Toronto’s programming committee in particular has a fixation with predicting Best Picture winners--and has been quite public about it. They consider themselves “the people’s festival” because there is a large public attendance, as opposed to many industry-only festivals, as such it’s their People’s Choice Award they imbue with predictive power.
[S]ince 2008, 14 out of the 15 [People’s Choice Awards] winners went on to receive a best picture nomination. Of those, five have outright won best picture at the Academy Awards. What’s even more impressive is that of the past 14 People’s Choice winners that went on to receive a best picture bid, all but one went home with at least one trophy on Oscar night.
— GoldDerby, reporting on the 2023 PCA Winner, American Fiction
Does this mean the Toronto attendees have the palate most compatible with American awards? Or does it say more about the programming team and their familiarity with studios?1 A PCA win might also mean more of a campaign for the studio behind the film. As always, it seems more of a convergence of factors that come together to make things happen.
True outliers and unexpected outcomes are not popular and often result in industry backlash.
Last year, the big controversy was an unexpected Best Actress nod to Andrea Riseborough. I don’t think anyone who pays attention to contemporary cinema can claim she’s undeserving of accolades: her acting is spectacular, in all roles she takes on. So what is the problem? The movie, “To Leslie,” didn’t spend or make enough big bucks? Did she "steal" the slot from someone who was millions deep into campaigning?
The first controversy I remember from my Oscar-watching days was that of Melissa Leo, who put out her own For Your Consideration ads while campaigning for “The Fighter” (she ended up taking home the prize, despite the uproar).
Campaigns aren’t new, and trying to get around rules isn’t new either. Much of the recent discussion on Awards campaigning revolves around Harvey Weinstein, as he is credited for making the game more vicious and cutthroat, normalizing more aggressive tactics such as smearing opponents. One of the oft-cited dirty campaigns is the one waged against Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan” on behalf of “Shakespeare in Love.”
But even Spielberg didn’t seem to think this was anything new, despite being on the receiving end. Perhaps he’s benefited from such approaches in the past, or is simply inured from his experience.
SPIELBERG: Back in the ’40s and ’50s, there was bloc voting — the Academy members at Fox were voting against the members at Warner Bros. and they were all being trounced by the voters at MGM. I mean, this is not foreign to anyone who has had experience growing up in this town. It’s just a reality, something we live with.
I don’t follow Awards season religiously anymore, not because I don’t think most of the films that end up nominated or shortlisted are bad or undeserving, but because there are enough politics and business involved to muddy the waters. As longtime film industry reporter Nikki Finke said, “There are agendas upon agendas upon agendas in Academy voting just as there is in everything to do with Hollywood.”
It's a ceremony that exists for all involved to profit from, they even say as much. From studio executives who want to supercharge the box office to the Academy themselves.
ROBERT REHME (ACADEMY PRESIDENT) When somebody got very aggressive, as long as they’d adhere to the rules and regulations, I thought it was great. I was concerned about TV ratings, and I thought that would help improve ratings. If they spend a ton of money and people become more and more aware and think it’s more of a race, it’s good for the Academy ratings.
The framing of these aggressive campaigns as support gives echoes of stans “supporting” their faves by working hard at discrediting opposition and attempting to game the system, paying for promotion, and putting out independent press releases.
I don’t think it’s a direct descendent of awards campaigning, but I do think it’s related to how stan culture and attachment has been used by industry to work in their favour. None of the stan support actually benefits the fan community; it leeches off of them, economically, if nothing else. But it helps the bottom line. Just like those statues promise to do.
The aggressive campaigning—just like the aggressive stan culture—is seen as a net positive.
We know about TIFF representatives flying out to Francis Ford Coppola’s winery to watch cutting-room footage of his panned 2011 feature Twixt — it was programmed, of course.
Oh yeah, I'd totally forgotten the Andrea Riseborough uproar haha. So many of these awards now turn into proxy battles for fanbases, often in attempts to settle scores from school-era grudges with some persistent ghost of a social enemy.
Twixt is a film by Francis Ford Coppola.