Watch For The Curve In This Year’s Film Awards Season
deadline.comFilm 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.
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