A lot to take in with this year’s Globes. Underneath the auspices of a tedious, tonally disjointed slog, quite a few of Hollywood’s demons were unleashed. A few thoughts before we bid farewell to the HFPA for another year.
First takeaway: If you’re walking along a sidewalk in the next few days and either 1917 or OUATIH start walking alongside you, race to the other side of the street as fast as you can, because there is a chorus line of pianos about to fall on those two films’ heads.
Dropped by whom do you suppose?
Second Takeaway: If someone starts dropping stories on Tom Rothman’s baby, they will have crossed paths with a man for whom sitting quietly and taking it is not part of his repertoire. There may be no one on Earth who wants anything as bad as Ted Sarandos wants an Oscar, but America’s Most Beloved Entertainment Exec comes in a close second.
The joy radiating out of AMBEE Sunday night could’ve lit Southern California for years. To think that after all the money floating around here, Sony was the biggest winner of the night (albeit, the big winner with all of three awards).
That said, the rich paper trail created every time QT has opened his mouth for the past 30 years won’t require Woodward and Bernstein to dig up plenty of dirt to muddy the race.
Third Big Takeaway: Certainly I haven’t let many chances to mock the HFPA and its preposterous enclave of upstart maitre d’s pass me by. I stand by them all.
But today, I feel like I’ve been nipping at the shoelaces of giants.
Across the cinematic firmament over the past couple years, one by one, every body invented to preserve and defend film, filmgoing, and the film industry has caved in the face of the Netflix onslaught. Whereas two years ago, we all had a pretty good idea what a movie was and why that was something worth preserving and promoting, after 24 months of unrelenting tides of cash washing over us, almost every one of them has about-faced from steadfast resolve to “Oh, you say you’re a movie. Good enough for us!”
AMPAS, The MPA, Telluride–the entire festival firmament–has now crumbled before the mighty app and its checkbook. Then, here come the merry tiara-clad buffet-hopping band of 90 in-flight magazine fabulists, the group you would vote most likely to go racing after the goodie bags. For months, nay, years, they have been endlessly feted by The App and its minions—wined, dined, gift-bagged, and practically taken up residency, one assumes, at Chateau Sarandos,
Not only that but the App hands them on a silver platter not one, but three genuinely celebrated movies, from across the celebrated movies spectrum. The leading contender is as gold-plated a sprawling production of Hollywood royalty as you’re likely to ever see again, with a giant spend behind it and a Rotten Tomatoes rating of a million percent.
In the face of all that, what do this ludicrous light brigade do?
They said: How about we give you one for The Crown?
I have no clue how much these people are motivated by the larger secular issues here vs how much they are just voting for what movie they like (a revolutionary act in itself), but the noive on these people. Color me impressed.
Fourth Big Takeaway: When it comes to pouring tens (now hundreds?) of millions of dollars into the awards campaigns, I don’t agree with the case that these trophies are such important branding for nascent networks and therefore they are well worth the check. That may (or may not) be the case when it comes to TV, but in movies, the awards are increasingly serving a very distinct niche, and it’s the media-native niche most likely already almost certain to be Netflix subscribers.
Frankly, everyone talks that game and in the end what percent of this (90?) is just about people badly wanting to win an Oscar so they can win an Oscar?
Anyway, while I disagree with the case, there is a case there: A winning Oscar campaign is worth something. For Green Book, the Oscar win had a real, significant dollar value as people continued to see it in theaters.
It’s just a question of whether it’s worth the tens of millions that the upstarts are willing to pay.
But if there is a case to be made there, there’s very little a case to support the idea that a losing Oscar campaign is worth tens of millions of dollars. Or two losing Oscar campaigns. And who knows how this will ultimately play out? There are many cycles, alternately horrible and ridiculous, to go on the road to the Hollywood and Highland Mall. But that is the live possibility that The App is now staring into the barrel of: All this money spent for maybe a directing trophy. Perhaps a screenplay prize.
The day when Netflix lives by the same economics as the rest of the sector is now looming. The argument for its Awards Industrial Complex is going to be a lot less compelling if it doesn’t have The Big Prize to show for itself.
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