It’s easy to believe that Hollywood, unlike most industries, actually has contempt for its customers, especially if you were unlucky or uninformed enough to choose “Timeline” as your post-Thanksgiving dinner entertainment. But mostly, the movie business just sees us as people with no retention, who have to be fooled into seeing pictures of quality.
That’s about the only conclusion that can be drawn from the glut of exceedingly fine movies that have just been released or that are going to open between now and Christmas Day, all with the same golden goal in mind: Academy Award nominations.
The people who run the studios are convinced that upcoming movies such as “21 Grams,” “House of Sand and Fog,” “In America” and even the wildly entertaining “Big Fish” have only a moderate chance at success unless they are mentioned in the same sentence as “Oscar” or as “one of the top 10 films of the year.”
So, at a time when most would-be moviegoers are working overtime to earn more money to spend on more holiday shopping, the best movies of the year are spread out before us like a buffet we have no time to enjoy.
Ron Howard, whose fine Western drama “The Missing” is one of the items on that smorgasbord, calls the pre-Oscar bundling “madness.” Howard is making his next movie with Russell Crowe, star of Oscar hopeful “Master and Commander,” with whom Howard made the best picture Oscar winner “A Beautiful Mind.” Jennifer Connelly won a supporting actress Oscar for that film, but her wrenching performance in “House of Sand and Fog” is likely to put her in competition with Howard’s “The Missing” star Cate Blanchett.
Howard believes, like nearly every other creative type in Hollywood, that the bounty should be spread throughout the year. But the studios are convinced that releasing well-acted, well-directed movies with actual stories before late fall dramatically lessens their chances of being Oscar- and Golden Globe-nominated, or of ending up on critics’ Top 10 lists.
So they’re almost all released between Thanksgiving and Christmas, although two did take the chance of getting out of the gate early.
The strategy seemingly paid off for Clint Eastwood’s “Mystic River,” which still appears certain to win multiple nominations. Sofia Coppola’s “Lost in Translation,” on the other hand, seems to have lost momentum, despite being one of the best reviewed movies of the year.
Bill Murray is still likely to end up on the best actor list for “Lost in Translation,” but this is one of the films that will be hurt most by the Motion Picture Association’s ill-advised decision to ban distribution of “screener” tapes and DVDs to anyone except Academy members. It otherwise might have gotten a boost from critics’ association awards, some of which have been canceled in protest.
If you have the time and money, however, it will be a great month at the movies: the French documentary “To Be and To Have,” “The Barbarian Invasions” and, of course, “The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King” all will be competing for your attention along with the movies cited above. It’s too bad one of these wasn’t around last May, or in August.