Oscar bait

Early years From the first Oscars, there were instances of films whose initial, limited release at the end of a year was meant to qualify it for Academy consideration before a wider release. In 1933, MGM released the Greta Garbo classic Queen Christina in New York and Los Angeles the week after Christmas, expanding it to more cities once 1934 began. Six years later, it did the same with Gone with the Wind, which went on to win the Best Picture Oscar. "Oscar bait" was used in a critical 1948 review of John Ford's Fort Apache in The New Republic that ends with the sentence "Postcards are supposed to be sent through the mail; flashed self-consciously on the screen, they look like Oscar bait." The New York Times used it in a 1955 article about the then-upcoming The Harder They Fall, Humphrey Bogart's final film. A 1968 ad for The Lion in Winter quoted from a review in Cosmopolitan praising the performances of Peter O'Toole and Katharine Hepburn as "Oscar bait outings." These all referred to films or performances that, while they might attract the attention of Academy voters, were not explicitly made with them in mind. But also in 1948, the Supreme Court of the United States's decision in United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc., forbidding the studios from owning theater chains, changed the film industry profoundly. With their pictures no longer guaranteed to have an adequate theatrical run, and television beginning to offer competition, the studios had to rely increasingly on marketing to make films profitable. Thus their release patterns began following the calendar even more closely than they already had. Their 1985 adaptation of Forster's A Room with a View won three of the eight Oscars it was nominated for. By 1991 the modern film-release calendar, in which studios released the movies they had the highest Oscar hopes for in autumn and December, was set. Independent-film mogul Harvey Weinstein sought prestige for his productions through Oscars; it culminated in a 1998 Best Picture for Shakespeare in Love, another costume drama. == Statistical analyses ==

A study by Gabriel Rossman and Oliver Schilke, two sociologists at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), reviewed data from the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), such as genres and plot keywords, for 3,000 movies released between 1985 and 2009 to see what elements were likeliest to draw Oscar nominations. The researchers found that war movies, historical epics, and biographies earned the most. Plot elements of political intrigue, disabilities, war crimes and show business were also very common elements of nominated films. A release during Oscar season, or by an independent division of a major studio were also strong indicators. The study found that some keywords had a strongly negative correlation with Oscar nominations, such as "zombie", "breast implant" and "black independent film". Second and third were The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, the 2003 Best Picture winner, and The People vs. Larry Flynt, released in 1996.) Some films, Kalb says, can only be profitable if they are nominated for Oscars. For that reason studios plan their Oscar promotional campaigns long before the movie is even released. It has been estimated that The Weinstein Company spent $15 million on its Oscar campaign for ''The King's Speech, almost as much as was spent on the Oscar campaign of Weinstein-produced 1998 Best Picture Winner Shakespeare in Love''. Natalie Portman was expected to become one of Hollywood's highest-paid actresses after her 2010 win for Black Swan, and Halle Berry began asking for more than $10 million per film following her 2001 Oscar win for ''Monster's Ball''. ==Criticism==

In the 21st century, with expensive and sometimes successful campaigns like the Weinsteins' taking a larger role in the Oscar races, the term has become a pejorative among some critics. They suggest that producers and studios are essentially gaming the system, making movies with less attention to quality than to the features that Academy voters have shown a preference for. "At its worst, Oscar bait stinks up the room with its pretense to prestige," writes Sactown Magazine editor S.T. VanAiresdale in Slate. He cites in particular the 2011 film Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. Its producer, Scott Rudin, That particular nomination, which came after the film had not received any other major film award nomination such as a Golden Globe, was widely criticized. It was especially noted that it received a score of 45% from the online review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes—the worst score received by any Best Picture nominee in the site's history. Some critics think the term is overused. "If I were Oscar-blogging this year, a long rant about the empty foolishness of the phrase 'Oscar bait' would be on the way," tweeted film historian Mark Harris in early December 2012, before some of that year's likely Oscar nominees had even been released. Four years later, he explained his objections in a conversation with fellow Vulture editor Kyle Buchanan. Primarily, he felt that it reduced the filmmakers' motivations to an attempt to win an award, regardless of what they might actually have been. Buchanan agreed that there was "an implication that what appears to be prestigious is, in its own way, as formulaic as a Marvel blockbuster". For his part, he found the phrase to be "a kind of anti-intellectual dog whistle" for some users. Harris further observed that the films by directors such as Martin Scorsese, the Coen brothers and David Fincher released around Oscar season had many elements in common with movies by directors like Tom Hooper and Stephen Daldry often dismissed as Oscar bait, like star-heavy ensemble casts, showcase scenes for the stars and heavy marketing campaigns, yet it was only the "softer and more dismissible" films by the latter directors that were so labeled. "[It's] a way of diminishing movies by feminizing them," he said. "[I]t's used as a sneer in the same way that Masterpiece Theater was used in the 1980s and 'Merchant Ivory' was used in the 1990s." "This clustering of quality films in the post–Toronto Film Festival weeks of fall and winter frustrates critics, publicists, movie exhibitors, studios, and award voters," Adam Sternbergh wrote in a 2015 Vulture post. "[B]ut, most crucially, it alienates the movie audience." At the time that year's nominations were announced, he observed, it was expected that either Boyhood or Selma would win, yet the latter film had not yet gone into wide release, and another top contender, American Sniper, only went into wide release the day after nominations were announced. "Of all the side effects of this silly awards-show pileup, this one seems like the silliest: People are expected to care about the awards prospects of films they won't get to see until long after the awards are awarded." While acknowledging the dump months are a result of other factors besides the Oscars and beyond the studios' control, such as the weather, the economy and competition from other entertainment such as (especially) football season, Paul Shirey at JoBlo.com nevertheless calls on Hollywood to spread out its Oscar-quality releases throughout the year: Sternbergh suggests this could be facilitated by emulating the playoff formats of professional sports leagues, which divide their teams into conferences to ensure wide interest in postseason elimination contests. The Academy, he proposes, should return to five nominations for Best Picture and picking one nominee from each three-month quarter of the year, with the best second-place finisher getting the remaining wild card berth. ==In popular culture==

The 2006 Christopher Guest film For Your Consideration satirizes the concept of Oscar bait. The concept was parodied in the 2008 American Dad! episode "Tearjerker", in which the supervillain Tearjerker (Roger) produces a film called Oscar Gold, about a mentally challenged alcoholic Jewish boy whose puppy dies of cancer while he's hiding in an attic during the Holocaust. It is intended to be so tragic that anyone who watches it cries themselves to death. In the British comedy series Extras, actress Kate Winslet plays a caricature of herself desperate for an Oscar. During the episode, Winslet tells the character Andy Millman (portrayed by Ricky Gervais) that she took the role in the unnamed Holocaust film, claiming that films such as ''Schindler's List and The Pianist have "Oscars coming out of the arse". Later in the episode, Winslet also muses that "playing a mental" also guarantees an Oscar win. Winslet would later win her first Academy Award, Best Actress, for her role as an illiterate former Nazi in The Reader'' (2008). In the film Tropic Thunder (2008), characters Tugg Speedman (Ben Stiller) and Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey Jr.) discuss the concept regarding Speedman's former role in the fictional film Simple Jack, in which Lazarus notes that "you never go full retard", contrasting the Oscar successes of Dustin Hoffman (Rain Man, 1988) and Tom Hanks (Forrest Gump, 1994) with Sean Penn's failure to win an award for his role in I Am Sam (2001). Tropic Thunder received protests from disability rights organisations due to its constant use of the word "retard"; Stiller defended the scene as being intended to lampoon actors who use such subjects as a way to win awards. During the week before the 2017 Academy Awards telecast, NBC talk show host Seth Meyers ran a parody trailer for Oscar Bait, "a film that is shamelessly timed for awards season" on his show. It featured clips of Meyers and others involved with his show as actors crying frequently, with scenes featuring racial tension and latent homosexuality along with "pretentiously artistic shots of a man's hand grazing wheat". Intertitles quoted purported reviews from real publications, such as "If you like films where a character is forced to overcome a rare disease, then this, my friends, is your film" and comparing the parody film favorably with ''The King's Speech''. ==In other media awards==

The "bait" phrasing has been used in the context of the other major American popular-media awards. Cheek to Cheek, the album of jazz standards Lady Gaga began recording in 2013 with Tony Bennett, has been referred to as "Grammy bait". Later, in 2013, The Daily Beast came out with an article that bemoaned the Primetime Emmy Awards' apparent antipathy to the performances of child actors in television shows that otherwise received many nominations and noted that they Those usages suggest work whose aspirations would be likely to be rewarded by awards voters, rather than marketing that depends on award nominations to turn a profit. However, on Broadway, where theatrical productions vie for Tony Awards, while the term "Tony bait" has not been seen, many believe those awards have come to determine how plays and musicals are marketed. Their complaints are similar to those of film enthusiasts. "The Tony deadline is now the central organizing event that drives Broadway, for better and for worse," producer Thomas Viertel told The New York Times in 2012. While that date, set by the awards committee, varies every year, it is usually in late April. Nearly half of a new season's productions open in March or April. "Many theater producers and their star actors prefer to open in spring in hopes of having the highest profile possible for Tony voters," the Times wrote. "[They] open at the last possible moment so their shows (and, hopefully, the rave reviews) are fresh in the minds of Tony nominators and voters." Apple Computer used similar baiting techniques to promote "1984," an iconic Super Bowl commercial. In order to ensure the advertisement qualified for advertising awards issued in early 1984, the company purposely aired the ad December 31, 1983 on KMVT, a station serving a small market in Idaho's Sun Valley, an area where advertising executives had second homes, ahead of the ad's national debut. ==See also==