Watch For The Curve In This Year’s Film Awards Season
25.07.2022 - 18:31
/ deadline.com
Film award seasons, most of them, follow a curved track. The action begins in one place (at the Telluride festival), then loops around to end somewhere else (with the Oscars at the Dolby Theater, unless the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences exercises its early termination option with that venue in 2024).
Meanwhile, contenders slide across the lanes, sort of like a bowling ball. They start on one side, curve toward the pocket, and mostly miss. With all those curves and loops, early predictions are an obviously hazardous affair—but you can often see where the field, down the line, will inevitably shift.
In the mid-2000’s, when a preponderance of Oscar voters lived in and around Los Angeles, for instance, you could spot a distinct mid-season tilt, from the East to the West. New York sophisticates—critics, the media, a clannish pool of cinephiles and indie executives—rallied around an early favorite like The Aviator in 2004 or Brokeback Mountain in 2005. Then Los Angeles populists—below-the-line voters, studio marketers, the trade press—helped to crown the actual winners, heart-over-mind Million Dollar Baby and L.A.-centric Crash in those particular years.
Radical changes in Academy membership altered the curve. But you could still detect a predictable turn in recent awards seasons. Three weeks before the last Oscar ceremony, one supporter of the austere, tough-minded Power Of The Dog asked me privately: “Are people going to go all Green Book this year?” Meaning, will voters snub the sophisticated favorite Dog in favor of more conventional, heartwarming CODA, much as they had dumped Roma for Green Book in 2019?
I had to answer, “Yes, CODA will win.” The old East-West geographical tilt had become meaningless. But the