How to Buy Win an Oscar
January 18, 2008 | 3:25 pm | by t-blender |
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telegraph [uk]: As excitement - and uncertainty - mounts over this year’s Academy Awards, Hollywood insiders reveal how the studios raise the profiles of their contenders. By Jeremy Kay:
Get your film seen by Academy voters
If there is one mantra that awards consultants will repeat until they are blue in the face, this is it. “Your main focus is to get as many Academy members as possible to see the movie,” says Amanda Lundberg, an awards campaigner for more than 20 years, who worked with Miramax Films founder Harvey Weinstein and legendary awards strategist Cynthia Swartz on Chicago and Sex, Lies, and Videotape.
Pick the right release date
“One way you hope people will see your movie is in the theatres,” Lundberg says. Broadly speaking, to qualify for Oscar consideration this year, a film must have gone on general release for one continuous week in a commercial cinema in Los Angeles County between Jan 1 and Dec 31 2007. Conventional wisdom dictates that awards films avoid the summer blockbuster logjam and open in the last three months of the year.
Take out ads in the Hollywood trade press
Studios book TV spots and advertise their films in newspapers. They also start to take out ads in US trade magazines such as Variety in November around the Thanksgiving holiday. “This is the bread-and-butter of awards campaigning,” says Angelotti. “In the mid-1990s the Academy rules changed to ban direct mailing of members, so studios were no longer able to send marketing materials telling members that films were eligible in certain categories. So you try to reach the members through the ‘For your consideration’ ads.”
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