Audiences, particularly international audiences, are often forced to watch this cycle at a remove from the films themselves. The publicity cycle of awards season seeks to leverage awards success into box office returns, with the goal being to collect a few prestigious plaudits before the film is released to wide audiences. This is understandable; every producer pushing a low-budget niche-interest independent film is facing an uphill battle, and having a list of prizes and awards to put on the poster or the cover makes each potential sale just a little bit easier. However, the cumulative effect is numbing. Audiences and film fans are often asked to invest in an Oscar cycle without any particular horse in the race, asked to pick favourites blind and watch as pundits bicker about films that will not open in their markets for another few months.
Irish audiences know this particularly well. The Shape of Water dominated this year’s Oscar nominations, but won’t be available in cinemas until the middle of February. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri had been released the weekend before the nominations had officially been announced, but had already gone through the complete awards season cycle of “hype” and “backlash”, “underdog” and “frontrunner” before they had a chance to lay eyes upon it. Even the other nominees with a tangible Irish connection were not available for audiences to assess before the Academy Awards had done it for them. Lady Bird is scheduled to open in Ireland in the middle of February, weeks after it has been nominated. Outside of a preview at the Audi Dublin International Film Festival, Irish audiences will not get a chance to see The Breadwinner before the film’s victory or defeat has become a matter of public record.
American audiences frequently face a similar challenge, especially those who live outside of big cities like New York or Los Angeles. Phantom Thread ran awards-qualifying previews in Los Angeles and New York in November, but would not go on wide release until the weekend directly before the Oscar nominations were announced. The Shape of Water was only screening in seven hundred theatres across the United States in the five weeks before it received a Best Picture nomination, and most of those cinemas were concentrated in urban areas, the film having a very limited penetration beyond that.
All of this can contribute to the sense that the awards cycle largely exists at a remove from the regular movie-going experience, that many cinema-goers are locked out of any real engagement with the awards cycle by virtue of having very limited access to the kinds of films that dominate the conversation around nominations and awards. This year, the average total domestic gross of a Best Picture nominee up to the announcement of the nomination was $62.4m. Last year, that average was $52m. The year before that, it had been $74.62m. These average totals are significantly less than the top five films at the United States box office would make in a single weekend around this time of year; successful blockbusters could look to earn back multiples of these totals in their own opening weekends.
At some point, there was a clear cultural change in the way that the Academy approached the films that it considered for its end-of-year awards. In the later nineties and into the early years of the twenty-first century, the institution did a good job of balancing broad crowd-pleasing films with smaller fare. In 1997, the average box office earnings of the five Best Picture nominees was just under $200m, inflated by the success of Titanic. By those standards, 1998 was a much smaller year with that average around $88m, which was still greater than the average of the past three years. In 1999, it was back up to nearly $130m. In 2000, the number was down slightly to $127m. In 2001, it dropped again slightly to $123m. In 2002, it bounced back up to $132.5m. In 2003, it jumped again to $145m. These figures are all considerably higher than the modern averages of the Best Picture nominees, often existing as multiples. Even looking at the lists of films nominated, there was some expectation that the average audience member could have been expected to see at least two or three of the films ranked as the best of the year.
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