Oscar Bait: Difference between revisions
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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. [http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090624/OSCARS/906249995 This Roger Ebert piece] wonders if successful films that don't conform to Oscar Bait will find a place at the table again this way. This appears to have come true, as the 2010 ceremony's best picture category included the likes of ''[[Avatar]]'', ''[[District 9]]'', ''[[Inglourious Basterds]]'' and ''[[Up]]'', with the winner being [[The Hurt Locker|a war drama]] that few people actually saw (being a limited release in the middle of the [[Summer Blockbuster|summer]] and all). In 2011, the winner was ''[[The King's Speech]]''—a historical biopic about a soon to be king struggling against a speech impediment—winning for Best Picture and Best Director, which helped it become a big sustained box office hit for the general movie going public.
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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* Massive advertising ''to members of the Academy'' of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (the famed "For Your Consideration" ads). These campaigns got so out of hand in recent years that they may or may not have been a reason the Oscar ceremony was moved up to the end of February (instead of March): out of hopes that people would pay more attention to the films than the ads. (The main reason, of course, was to coincide with [[Sweeps]].)
* Free "screeners" of films in contention to these same voters, often for "little" movies which may not have been in the theaters long.
** What's sort of counter to the whole idea of the Academy Awards is that these "screeners" are usually just DVDs mailed en masse to all the voting members. In fact, very few voting members of the Academy Awards actually go to many theatrical screenings (if any). Some of this is because they almost always have jobs with odd hours (sometimes requiring them to go on location in a different country) and might not have the luxury of being able to catch a film in theaters. And even though some Mexican computer scientist has managed to create [https://web.archive.org/web/20090715085907/http://iteso.mx/~lcoria/index_archivos/page0005.html a watermarking technology for these screeners], there's always the Academy member who "coincidentally" happens to know the smuggler around the block, and yet the studios ''insist'' on giving away these screeners.
* Specifically creating Oscar Bait Movies—historical costume dramas, of the kind mentioned above mostly—and releasing them one after the other in order to appear to be the ''studio'' that "gets the most Oscars." (Miramax was notorious for this—following up ''[[Shakespeare in Love]]'' with ''Chocolat'', ''Chicago'' and ''Cold Mountain''.)
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