Oscar Bait: Difference between revisions
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{{quote|''"[[Inspirationally Disadvantaged|The diseased/addicted/mentally impaired]] always get the Oscar."''
|''Vanity Fair''|"Hollywood Rule Book"}}
You would think that a good movie is a good movie, and that good movies just get Oscars, wouldn't you?
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Indeed, many of these movies have not done well at the box-office in recent years. The diminishing ratings of recent Oscar telecasts may be related to the dislike the casual viewing public has for the average Oscar-nominated film. Some have argued that it's time the voters started getting back in line with "popular tastes" (though there are a few recent nominees that ''are'' blockbusters). But the people who do the nominations are unlikely to change their criteria, so the status quo continues. In extreme cases, this can lead to an [[Award Snub]]: movies widely accepted to be genuinely deserving but don't appear to tick the correct boxes are overlooked in favor of less-deserving fare which does.
It's worth nothing that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences [https://web.archive.org/web/20100721172303/http://www.moviecitynews.com/Notepad/2009/090624_pr.htm announced] that starting with the 2010 ceremony (honoring the films of 2009) the Best Picture category would be expanded to include ''ten'' nominees instead of the long-traditional five. [https://web.archive.org/web/20120112210336/http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=
It's also worth noting recent Best Picture winners like ''The Departed'' and ''No Country For Old Men'', along with the large number of depressing historical dramas (read: Oscar Bait) that don't win. The Academy may be able to detect more blatant bait.
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* The categories for Best Original Screenplay and Best Adapted Screenplay are famous for almost always going to the actual best movie of the year. Seriously; look down those lists and the one for Best Picture. Not a coincidence.
** This trend can be seen going all the way back to ''[[Citizen Kane]]'', whose sole Oscar win was for its screenplay.
* The Animated Feature category established in 2001 may ghettoize the form, but the voters are now more open to nominating independent efforts such as ''[[Persepolis]]'' and often eschew [[Quality by Popular Vote]] (''[[Spirited Away]]'''s 2002 win, [[
** An infamous Oscar Bait exception in the early days of this category is ''[[Millennium Actress]]'' (RT score 94%): opens with [[Titanic|an old woman recalling her past through flashbacks]], [[Forrest Gump]]-type period piece, [[Tear Jerker]], tragic ending... Sounds perfect for an Oscar Bait. Didn't received even a nomination at the 2003 Award. In case you're wondering, ''[[Brother Bear]]'' (RT score 38%) received a nomination that year.
** This category itself can be an exception if you take a look at the winners: 15 out of 15 of them are box office blockbusters, at least in their home countries (''[[Wallace and Gromit]]'' was a lesser sucess, but still).
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** The last horror film to win one of the top awards (and ''only'' one prior to ''Silence'') was ''[[Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde]]'', for which Fredric March won Best Actor...in 1932!
** Consider that the one other film among the 1991 Best Picture nominees that compared in terms of critical praise ''and'' box-office popularity was ''[[Beauty and the Beast]]'', which had the [[Animation Age Ghetto]] working against it—to the point that jokes were made during the telecast about how a film consisting of "movable paintings" (as Billy Crystal put it in his opening number as host) was up against movies with live actors.
* ''[[The Lord of the Rings]]'' and ''[[Titanic]]'' were about trying to get dream projects on screen, not about winning Oscars. Yet one got a sweep, and the other got almost all of its awards, though the former did not do so until the entire trilogy was finished (it's suggested the awards for Return of the King apply to the whole trilogy as the Academy didn't want a three-year shutout). Both films were widely praised and made a ridiculous amount of money and remain excessively popular to this day, even factoring in the usual [[Hype Backlash]].
* ''[[Star Wars]]'' (the original 1977 film) got Oscar nominations for Best Director, Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor (for Sir Alec Guinness) and Best Screenplay. It didn't win any of them, of course, but ''still''. ''[[Raiders of the Lost Ark]]'' also managed to get nominations for Best Director and Best Picture.
** Same for ''[[E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial|ET the Extraterrestrial]]''.
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** Then again, remember what it was [[Forrest Gump|up]] [[Pulp Fiction|against]].
** The next Darabont direction of a King adaptation was ''[[The Green Mile]]''...another prison piece with the [[Magical Negro]] (getting Michael Clarke Duncan a Best Supporting Actor nod), and was nominated for three others, including Best Picture...but whiffed itself. Probably why the next time Darabont directed a King adaptation, they went as far from Oscar Bait as humanly possible with ''[[The Mist]]''...
* ''[[The Dark Knight]]'', the first comic-book movie to win an acting nomination (for [[Heath Ledger]]), with three acting nominations for films based on graphic novels (or in one case, a comic strip) preceding this win.<ref>For those keeping score at home, these were Al Pacino for ''Dick Tracy'', Paul Newman for ''[[Road to Perdition]]'' and William Hurt in ''A History of Violence''</ref> Not to mention being one of the very few comic-book movies to be nominated in ''any'' of the non-technical categories ([[Dead Artists Are Better|Though it's debated how likely its win would have been if Ledger were still alive.]])
* ''[[The Departed]]'' along with its immediate successor to the Best Picture throne ''[[No Country for Old Men]]'' is one of the grittiest, most violent (non war related) movies to ever take the Best Picture Oscar. It also notably has the most profanity of any film to win Best Picture. Other than Martin Scorsese's involvement there's not really anything about it that screams Oscar Bait. People can't really agree on whether it won on the basis of it being good or [[Consolation Award|because Martin Scorsese had been denied the Oscar numerous times before.]] One thing is for certain though, The Departed is nowhere near the Oscar Bait levels reached by ''[[The Aviator]]'' and ''[[Gangs of New York]]'', Scorsese's two previous films both period pieces and one a biopic. Neither won Best Director or Picture (plus, the latter got shut out of 11 noms!).
* The two "dinner scenes" in ''[[The Nutty Professor]]'', which featured [[Eddie Murphy]] playing all the members of his family, were widely credited with giving the film the Best Makeup award over the favorite, ''[[Star Trek: First Contact]]''. Thing is, this was completely accidental - the director hated the idea and didn't want to film the sequences, but Eddie Murphy and Rick Baker managed to persuade him to keep them in.
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** This particular joke has been around since the days of the original [[Looney Tunes]]. Given the Mask's personality, that's most likely where he got the idea.
*** The hilarious part is that the mobsters that were shooting at him also react to the audience, checking their hair and straightening their suits like they were on television.
* ''[[Wayne's
* The ''[[Road To]]'' series had a couple of spoofs:
** At the end of ''[[Road
** In ''Road to Bali'', when [[Bing Crosby]] finds the Oscar [[Humphrey Bogart]] received for ''[[The African Queen]]'', Bob Hope snatches it away from him, tells him he already has one. Hope then begins making his acceptance speech. (He never was nominated for a competitive one, but he would receive 4 Honorary Oscars and the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award - plus, he frequently appeared at the show, often as the host.)
* In ''[[Don't Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood]]'', after parodying one of the dramatic scenes from ''[[Boyz N the Hood]]'', the main character tells his girlfriend that he's trying to win the Best Black Actor at the Soul Train awards.
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* Since an Oscar speech kicks off the plot of the comedy ''[[In and Out]]'', the first 15 minutes of the movie has a field day with this trope. First, Matt Dillon's character wins for playing a gay soldier unfairly discharged from the military in a movie called ''To Protect And Serve'', which is a hilariously hammy pastiche incorporating elements of ''A Few Good Men'', ''Philadelphia'' and ''Forrest Gump.'' Second, the other nominees in the category are listed as follows: "Paul Newman for ''Coot'', Clint Eastwood for ''Codger'', Michael Douglas for ''Primary Urges'' and Steven Seagal for ''Snowball in Hell''."
* ''[[The Naked Gun]] 33 1/3''. The films nominated at the Oscars were all ridiculously [[High Concept]] ("the story of a woman coming to terms with the death of her dog during the Hindenburg disaster).
* In ''[[Om Shanti Om]]'', bratty star Om "OK" Kapoor belatedly realizes that he is in the Indian equivalent of
** Later in the film, we are treated with a parody of a Filmfare Awards ceremony (The closest equivalent to the Oscars in Hindi film industry), and we see the nominations for Best Main Actor. Two of the nominations are parodies of the kind of action films the other nominees (Abhishek Bachchan and Akshay Kumar [[Adam Westing]]) are known to do, the other two are films by OK which are parodies of romantic films that Shah Rukh Khan (Ok's actor) have famously done.
=== [[Live Action TV]] ===
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[[Category:Film Genres]]
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[[Category:Award Bait]]
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