independent.ie– Few things gladden the heart of the seasoned Oscar-watcher like a good statistic — and the annual tallying up of the Best Picture nominees’ box-office takings is one of the best.
Yes, they might be the Academy’s favourite films of the year, but has anyone paid to see them — and if they didn’t, what does that say about the gap between Hollywood’s tastes and those of its audience?
Recent years have suggested that the industry and its customers are on the same page. In 2020 the likes of 1917, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Joker hauled in pounds 1.89 billion worldwide, while in 2019, with Black Panther, Bohemian Rhapsody and A Star Is Born on the list, the total was an even sturdier pounds 2.36 billion.
Having scratched together a mere pounds 30 million between them to date, it’s fair to say that the class of 2021 has not lived up to its predecessors – although with cinemas shuttered for much of the past 13 months, that’s hardly their fault.
But this year’s most telling statistic isn’t what the nominees made but what they cost. The answer – pounds 91.9 million all in – is peanuts in moviemaking terms: less than a third of the cost of the 2019 batch and less than a fifth of 2020’s.
The big, bruising, studio-backed beasts are largely nowhere to be seen. Never before have the underdogs packed such a yap.
When Hollywood decided a year ago that its response to the pandemic would be to hide until it was over, an entire crop of expensively reared, purpose-grown Oscar films had to be put into storage. For 20th Century Studios (formerly Fox, but now owned by Disney) this included Steven Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story, Kenneth Branagh’s Death on the Nile, Ridley Scott’s medieval epic The Last Duel and, at their subsidiary, Searchlight Pictures, Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch.
For Warner Bros it was Denis Villeneuve’s blockbuster adaptation of Dune, the Will Smith-led sports drama King Richard, about the father of the tennis-playing Williams sisters, and a screen version of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical In the Heights. Sony Pictures had The Nightingale, a period piece set during the Nazi occupation of France, while Universal had Respect, an Aretha Franklin biopic starring Jennifer Hudson — and of course Bond, which could have expected a Best Original Song nomination at least.
As such, the only two of this year’s finalists which feel in any way obvious are the Netflix entries, the sleek Hollywood period piece Mank and the all-star courtroom showdown The Trial of the Chicago 7, which of course the streaming company was able to release whether cinemas were open or not.
The other six are the kind of films that in any other year would be the long shots and outsiders — yet in 2021 they’re at the heart of the race.
Promising Young Woman is a stylised and divisive provocation and the brainchild of an English actress who had a stint as showrunner on Killing Eve.
Sound of Metal is a thoughtful, interiorised, innovative drama about deafness more than 10 years in the making, which could barely scrape together its pounds 3.6 million budget thanks to its subject matter, its director’s lack of experience and, in Riz Ahmed, its British-Asian lead.
The largely Korean-language Minari — the box-office colossus of the pack — was written by its director while he was teaching documentary theory, film history and screenwriting, after having decided to quit filmmaking for a stabler job.
The Father is an adaptation of an original play, directed by its French playwright.
The civil rights conspiracy thriller Judas and the Black Messiah started life as a screenplay called Jesus Was My Homeboy, written eight years ago by the identical-twin comedians the Lucas brothers.
Thomas Vinterberg, the Danish Best Director nominee, adapted his Best International Feature nominee Another Round from an abandoned play at the behest of his teenage daughter Ida – who died in a car crash one week into production (the film is dedicated to her memory).
Chloe Zhao, director of the dazzling, dusk-lit road movie Nomadland, is a Chinese woman who grew up in Beijing and Brighton, then made her first two films on an Indian reservation in South Dakota.
Even Mank – the nominee most open to charges of showbusiness narcissism, since it’s a velvety tale of Old Hollywood intrigue – was conceived of and written by its director David Fincher’s father, a Texan magazine journalist who died 18 years ago (the film is his only screen credit). Self-satisfied Los Angeles elites this bunch are not.
The general air of scrappiness and pluck has only been heightened by the fact that most tried-and-tested campaigning methods have been scuppered by Covid. Meet-and-greet screenings, drinks receptions and so on are out: streaming from the sofa is in, as are Zoom Q&As broadcast directly from the directors’ and stars’ living rooms, which boast all the glamour and polish of the average weekly video call with the relatives.
Could a year of this have done the Academy some good?
With any luck, yes, if it emboldens its members to watch and vote more widely when normality returns. Wouldn’t it be fun if a film as quietly miraculous as Nomadland — which, if it prevails, will be one of the great 21st-century Best Picture winners — could feel like a front-runner every year?
Highlights of the show are on RTÉ2 at 9.35pm tomorrow. And if you’ve missed the glitz, the tackiness, the treachery and desperation… well, there’s always 2022.
