Numlock Awards: The Oscar Bait era is over. The Oscar Chum era is here.
Why Oscar Chum is ruining the Oscars, and how to fix it.
Numlock Awards is your one-stop awards season newsletter. Every week, join Walt Hickey and Michael Domanico as they break down the math behind the Oscars and the best narratives going into film’s biggest night. Today’s edition comes from Walter. We’ll have one more edition this year, the mailbag, send an email to awards@numlock.news with thoughts!
Oscar bait. We’ve all seen it. A studio out of other options tries to pretend their melodrama is the movie that will heal a broken nation. A filmmaker who desires prestige takes on a project from a filing cabinet labeled “misery porn,” ideally set in Fúczstħizberg during nineteen thirty bad. An actor starts learning an accent, takes a role from the leeward side of the socioeconomic bell curve, cracks open the DSM, or attempts to dial in on the precise level of adversity or disability so that their peers will deem their performance worthy.
For years, this was the way that studios strategized to get Oscars: shilling overwrought performances with gauzy scripts and gratuitous directing in movies lab-created to appeal to The Academy. Perfected at a sophisticated research facility later known as Miramax National Laboratories, you know the movies and the performances I’m talking about: The King’s Speech, The Reader, The Danish Girl, Life Is Beautiful, War Horse, The Imitation Game, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. The strategy was simple: ensnare the votes by going for the heart.
That era is over. Oscar bait just doesn’t work anymore. Sure, some movies will go for the playbook — Green Book feels like a recent victorious example — but we’re past bespoke, individually-crafted Oscar pitches handcrafted by artisans desperate for a nomination. We’ve gone industrial, baby.
The era of Oscar Bait is over. The era of Oscar Chum is here.
On Oscar Chum
I argue Oscar Chum is the phenomenon where movies at the Oscars get a ton of nominations in categories where they present no actual chance of winning simply because they’re a Best Picture contender, thus crowding out actually interesting and worthy nominees.
The math is basic: you only need a few dozen votes to get an Oscar nomination in certain branches, and the campaigns realize that. A big stack of nominations is enough to keep your job, even if it’s never enough to actually get a win. So you compete hard in lots of categories and hope if you can crank up the baseline name recognition high enough, that you can bag enough votes in smaller categories to run up the nominations scoreboard.
This works, because if every dollar of your marketing expense goes to elevating one single film, you’re talking just 88 votes to get a writing nomination, just 92 ballots to get a sound nomination, merely 67 to get a song nominated, and just 66 votes to get an editing nomination.
This only really works if you put all your resources into one film that can carry in all the categories, and so lately, we’ve had a phenomenon where studios will pick one movie, specifically one movie that can compete in pretty much every category, and then will push it as hard as possible to try to get as many nominations as possible.
There were ten Best Picture nominees this year, and every single one of them had a different distributor. Sure, Conclave’s Focus Features is owned by Wicked’s Universal, but the point stands: do you have any idea how hard that is to do in a country where there are only five major studios? Ten years ago, in 2015, Fox was running Brooklyn, The Martian and The Revenant against each other in a field of eight movies. We used to be a proper country.
Earlier this year, I wrote about why Emilia Perez was never actually the frontrunner. I wrote about how it’s emblematic of this shift. If Oscar bait is a knife in your heart, Oscar chum is a shotgun to your ballot.
Here’s how I described some of the more obvious ways this strategy has manifested over the past several years:
Let’s say you’re a hypothetical company called Qwikster and you’re new on the scene and you want to make a big splash. You have a very considerable awards budget, but you also (as a result of your business model) have an incredibly cutthroat and probably accurate understanding of your typical slob’s attention span. As a result, you really want to run one and only one movie as the flagship of your Oscar campaign, but you want to make it impossible to avoid, and compete in every category.
You’d probably want a visually splashy flick (to get you those below-the-lines), lots of worthy stars (there are four acting categories! Four!), with distinctive music in it (the music branch is capable of nominating songs that couldn’t even get optioned for elevators) and hell, if you can also run it for Best International that’s a freebie. Run up the scoreboard, a bit; after all, you have friends in lots of branches, you can get the noms.
Does it work? It gets a lot of nominations, yeah, and in a metrics-focused campaign that’s probably good. But does it win? Fuck no, ask Mank, Roma, The Power of the Dog, The Trial of the Chicago Seven, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Irishman — and those are just the Netflix ones.
The effect is that a higher and higher share of Oscar nominations are going only to the most popular movies, particularly the ones outside the most- or second-most-nominated pictures. Good-performing movies are getting better at scooping up nominations on the margins, at the expense of niche movies.
How do I spot Oscar Chum?
Oscar Chum can best be understood as those little strategic moves that add up the nominations scoreboard.
Not all the tricks are new. Category fraud, when a lead performance parachutes into supporting for the specific strategic reason of not wanting to run against a co-lead, has been around for some time now. (See: Brad Pitt in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, most of the supporting performances from this year, the fact that this category is now Best Leading Actor Who Is Running In A Slightly Easier Category So They’re Not Competing Against A Co-Star.)1
Think about all the times that an adaptation of a musical adds a terrible little song to pad out the scoreboard, shitty little ditties like “Learn to Be Lonely” from Phantom of the Opera or “Suddenly” from Les Misérables. On the same token, how many Original Songs are jammed into the credits where people don’t need to bother listening to them? Heck, Dianne Warren has been relegated to that end credits slot so long she could start charging rent when anyone else does it. The category is shameless for this kind of chum to pad out the scoreboard; I could not hum the tune to nominee “This Is a Life” from Everything Everywhere All At Once if you offered me ten thousand dollars, and I liked that movie.
When a short film — animated or otherwise — has a big-named nominee like, say, Wes Anderson or Riz Ahmed or Kobe Bryant or Questlove or John Lennon’s kid, well, that just does feel a little bit unsporting. Or when a major studio like Pixar pushes their short over a bunch of rivals that paid for their short with lunch money, just seems a bit off, no?
Some of the tricks do feel new, though.
Have you ever seen a For Your Consideration ad these days? I get these are industry documents, but it’s not enough to pitch a performance for a film, or one or two crafts; they pitch every one they can, in every category they can, regardless of quality. The whole movie runs as a big, massive slate, like it’s a primary in New Jersey.
