BEHIND THE SCREENS

The trouble with Oscar

Art trumps commerce, and the academy finds itself more out of step than ever.

James Bates

Behind the Screens

January 31, 2006

All you need to know about how hard it will be to get people to watch the Oscars is that a nominated documentary about penguins has been watched by more moviegoers than any of the five best picture contenders.

Or that four out of five people — and sometimes fewer — tuning into the broadcast will not have seen any of those movies in a theater.

Or that roughly only 200,000 people so far have seen Felicity Huffman's Oscar-nominated performance in "Transamerica." That's less than 1% of the weekly viewers who watch her on ABC's "Desperate Housewives."

Call it a triumph of art over commerce. In a year of small but quality films, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has followed to the letter its artistic mission. Or call it a massive disconnect with popular culture, a lineup of blue state movies playing in a red state multiplex.

Either way, the box office of nominated films wouldn't matter if the academy only cared about honoring the industry's best work.

If that was the case, self-congratulatory corks would have popped at 5:45 a.m. Tuesday morning at its Wilshire Boulevard headquarters and the $50.9 million they reaped from last year's Oscar show wouldn't have been all that important.

But the fact is that the academy needs the big bucks it gets from the televised beast it created that demands to be fed big ratings. How else will advertisers feel OK paying $1.7 million for a 30-second acid reflux drug spot that follows the live performance of the nominated song "In the Deep" from best picture candidate "Crash."

Oscar producers each year try to change the show's format to boost viewership, but are resigned to declaring victory when ratings don't fall. As box office king "Titanic" showed, big movies are the most reliable guarantee of a big audience.

Last year, an average of 41.5 million people nationwide watched the Oscars, compared to the record 55 million in 1998 when "Titanic" nearly swept the awards. Consider that, depending on how much they paid for a ticket (in major cities theaters charge more), only about 6 million to 8 million people saw the top-grossing "Crash," according to box office numbers cruncher Paul Dergarabedian of Exhibitor Relations.

By contrast, he notes, "March of the Penguins" was watched in theaters by as many as 12 million people in the U.S.

All told, the $187 million cumulatively grossed in the U.S. by the five best picture nominees is the lowest in at least a decade, falling below even the gross of the mildly disappointing "King Kong."

For the Oscars, staging a contest involving films that are good, but not so popular, is similar to what pro sports face every year. In theory, leagues profess to want every team to have a chance, even though you know Major League Baseball wants the ratings generated by the New York Yankees or that the NFL would die to get the Dallas Cowboys back in the hunt. That makes the Seattle Seahawks the "Capote" of this Sunday's Super Bowl.

The Oscar nominations may mirror a year when Hollywood wrung its hands each week over lower box office numbers, while at the same time turning out what many critics believe was a terrific group of movies.

Maybe this is the year the Oscar producers should throw caution to the wind and really make it a celebration of the films. Forget the obsession with stars. Promote the artistry. Remind people why they like going to the movies instead of watching the latest countdown show on a plasma TV.

Unfortunately, the academy will react as it usually does by trying to beef up the lineup with the same stars punk'd by Ashton Kutcher and who are booked on every talk show to plug their latest films.

Which is all the more reason the show could use a few good penguins.

Un-bearable oversight
Not nominated for a best feature documentary Oscar was Werner Herzog's "Grizzly Man" even though it was by far the best reviewed film in its genre this year.

That's no surprise, given this bear had long ago been put out of its misery. As detailed in a column here recently, a tiny, cartel-like group of documentarians aced it out of the running for an Oscar nomination by deciding that it wasn't one of the 15 films they decided should be eligible for the five nomination slots.

Underscoring the absurdity of the rules that led to that decision, Herzog was honored Saturday by the Directors Guild of America as the best documentary director.

It was the first DGA nomination, let alone win, for the 63-year-old German director, whose past films include "Fitzcarraldo" and "Aguirre: The Wrath of God."

And he isn't even a guild member.

Good Night and, finally, Good Luck
Three years ago, I wrote a front-page profile for The Times of Jim Bissell, a film production designer from Studio City whose work too often took him away from his family to Canada, where studios could reap financial incentives and cheap currencies that make runaway production a problem for Los Angeles.

Bissell had just completed work in Montreal on George Clooney's big-screen directorial debut, "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind." He had never been nominated for an Oscar, despite having worked on such major films as "E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial" and "Bull Durham."

Having just turned 50 at the time, Bissell was clearly bothered by it, working in an industry where one is too often judged by the hardware on the mantle.

"I'm not quite sure what my industry reputation is," he told me at the time. "Maybe I'm still on the A-list, maybe I'm not. I'm probably at the low end of the A-list, maybe at the upper end of the B-list. I would be in much better shape if I had an Oscar nomination"

A decent guy in a business where there's a big shortage of them, Bissell on Tuesday scored his first Oscar nomination for art direction for Clooney's "Good Night, and Good Luck." And, it was shot in Los Angeles.