So do any of these release date changes many anything, anything in the scheme of things for this year’s Best
Picture Oscar race? It seems highly unlikely that films once thought since Cannes as potential Oscar contenders (generally labeled by the media) would have made the list, even if the Academy goes for the full ten nominees. Weinstein’s Grace Of Monaco and The Immigrant, both touted last May in Cannes have moved on and no one is missing them in this race. Nicole Kidman in Grace and Marion Cotillard in Immigrant might have ballooned the impressive list of Best Actress contenders but in the end the likely five nominees will probably be chosen from a short list of frontrunners led by Cate Blanchett, Sandra Bullock, Judi Dench, Emma Thompson, Meryl Streep and Kate Winslet -all former Oscar winners like Kidman and Cotillard so the trajectory and personality of that race is unaffected. Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher could have prompted a campaign for Steve Carell but Sony Pictures Classics already has another good bet, Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine in the Best Picture sandbox so better to let it go to 2014 than try to squeeze a spot at the end of this very crowded year. The real “SHOCKER” as some breathless headlines stated yesterday was the decision by George Clooney and Grant Heslov, who won the Best Picture Oscar just last year for Argo, to move their planned December release of the World War II thriller, Monuments Men to February following a similar path Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island took a few years ago. That decision worked out well for Scorsese as the film became his most successful ever at the box office.
As Clooney told my colleague Mike Fleming Jr. earlier today he wasn’t in this for the Oscars and December was a good luck date where his Ocean’s 11 films had played. I had always heard from the beginning that Clooney wasn’t ever really looking at Men as an Academy Award play, but a commercial picture, his Guns Of Navarone as he reiterated in the Fleming interview. In fact a top Sony source told me in the summer that Clooney had told them he wasn’t looking to campaign it (but the exec insisted they would cross that bridge when they came to it). Of course sometimes you can have both box office success and Oscar recognition.
Ironically Guns Of Navarone went on to win 7 Oscar nominations in 1961 including Best Picture. Could that have happened for Clooney’s pet project too? Who knows but the list of potential nominees with a realistic chance is a very long one that includes another Clooney film in which he co-stars -Gravity- and yet another Clooney film he produced with Heslov, August: Osage County. What did he need another one for? Or Sony for that matter which already has a very strong Best Pic contender Captain Phillips, and another potential with David O. Russell’s unseen American Hustle coming out in December where now it appears the other major unseen contender, Paramount’s The Wolf Of Wall Street is definitely going to land, further crowding the territory. The list in addition to all of the above is loaded with prospects that also include 12 Years A Slave, Nebraska, Saving Mr. Banks, Inside Llewyn Davis, Dallas Buyers Club, All Is Lost, Lee Daniels’ The Butler, Fruitvale Station, Philomena, Labor Day, Universal’s Lone Survivor and Rush (although despite strong reviews, weak domestic box office doesn’t help the latter’s chances), and several others. Some may even view the so-called “thinning” of the field as helpful to the chances of darker horses like Mud, The Place Beyond The Pines, Enough Said, Her, The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty and another upcoming 20th Fox sleeper The Book Thief which I think could surprise.
It is always interesting to see the amount of pressure put on films that are released after Labor Day. Critics and
pundits walk into most of them not as a regular movie but rather as an “Oscar picture” and judgment on the film’s merits really gets sidetracked. It’s not always fair. I know for a fact Bill Condon set out to make a movie, rather than a contender, when he took on The Fifth Estate (a film I really liked). At the time he told associates he didn’t want it to be in the Oscar game. When it crashed at the box office this weekend headlines said “Oscar hopeful flops” etc. In retrospect taking the opening night slot at Toronto probably did the film no favors as it was doomed after that, no matter what the original intentions.
Now that his film is no longer an “Oscar picture” – at least for 2013 – I look forward to seeing Clooney’s Monuments Men as just an old fashioned movie. Remember those?
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