New Oscar Date Thickens the Plot

The year’s top Oscar-caliber movies might open in the fall instead of December. Studios could begin mailing DVDs of their films to Academy Award voters before the films even reach the theaters. And the millions of dollars studios now spend on costly Oscar campaigns could be whittled back.

Those are some of the scenarios being sketched out by Hollywood insiders after the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ decision to move the Oscars up a month in 2004 as part of a two-year experiment.

Viewers of the annual Academy Awards show on ABC may wonder why shifting the telecast from late March to late February is a big deal, but in Tinseltown, it’s enough to buckle, crack and shift the seismic plates undergirding the movie industry.

As it now stands, studios hold back some of the biggest and best movies until December, believing that Oscar voters’ memories are short and wanting to cash in on bigger box office once the nominations are announced early the following year.

But with the Oscars moving to Feb. 29, 2004--a month earlier than usual--the new date could have wide ramifications for studios as well as Hollywood’s two major trade publications, Variety and the Hollywood Reporter.

For studios, a shorter Oscar season could mean spending less on marketing, but the downside is that they could see box office revenues drop because of the shorter time between nominations and awards.

Most studios are greeting the shift with cautious optimism. Indeed, a spokesman said this week that the academy was surprised that not one studio voiced opposition to the planned move.

It could be that the studios finally realize something needed to be done to correct the flaws in the current system--call it Hollywood’s version of campaign finance reform.

Michael Barker, co-president of Sony Pictures Classics, which released the Oscar-nominated “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” said a shorter Oscar season would be “pretty positive” for studios small and large.

“It puts the emphasis on the films themselves instead of the emphasis on many more weeks of campaigning,” Barker said.

As it now stands, he noted, “you have this long period of time between the nominations and the awards. The longer period of time, the more time people have to wage campaigns, and that shouldn’t be what it’s all about. It should be about the movies, seeing them and voting for what you think are the best.”

Russell Schwartz, president of domestic marketing at New Line Cinema, agreed that the current awards season goes on far too long, spawning more and more awards shows.

“If this helps prune the awards tree,” Schwartz said, “that would be a good thing.”

Schwartz, whose studio produced best-picture nominee “Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring,” said December is crammed with Oscar hopefuls, but that could change once the Oscars move up a month. He said studios might consider moving some Oscar hopefuls to November or even earlier: They could peak by Christmas and then only have a few weeks before the Academy Award nominations are announced.

“I still think those movies deemed holiday fare will stay where they are,” he said, noting that the Oscar season wouldn’t actually be shorter, just readjusted.

One of the academy’s chief concerns is that any shortening of the Oscar season allow enough time for voters to see the movies and for accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers to tabulate the nomination and final ballots.

Some studios are mulling whether to send out DVDs and videocassettes of their movies earlier than usual to ensure that voters will see the films, but they also express concern that if they send them out too early--before their theatrical releases at year’s end--they could fall victim to film piracy.

Still to be seen is what effect the new 2004 date would have on Oscar campaigning itself, particularly the glut of expensive “For your consideration” ads that run in both Hollywood trade publications, Daily Variety and the Hollywood Reporter, and have spilled over into the mainstream press in the movies pages of The Times and the New York Times.

This past season, the major studios spent an estimated $10 million to $15 million on Oscar campaigns, even plunking down $100,000 a pop for 10-page, full-color booklets touting their nominees.

Universal Studios spent more money on a single movie than ever before on its Oscar campaign for “A Beautiful Mind,” which went on to capture best picture.

In all, the studio spent about $3 million in trade advertising alone for all of its films. But the film’s eight nominations also boosted its box office by as much as $25 million.

What impact the earlier Oscar date could have on the trades is unclear. Charlie Koones, publisher of Variety Inc., said it’s too early to tell how its publications’ ad revenues would be affected. “My early instinct is that the ‘For your consideration’ seasons will move forward” into the fall, Koones said. He would not speculate on what the Oscar move would mean to the ad revenues at either weekly Variety or Daily Variety, which each have a circulation of about 36,000.

Robert J. Dowling, editor in chief and publisher of the Hollywood Reporter, which has a daily circulation of nearly 24,000 and a weekly circulation of nearly 32,000, said removing a month from the Oscar season, if that happens, would not have a significant impact on his company’s overall ad revenues.

Still, he said, “if 30 days are taken out of the whole process, then that’s 30 days’ worth of revenues that are probably going to come out of my paper.

“I’ve always looked at the Academy Award season as starting in mid-November and going to the end of March,” Dowling added. “If you take 30 days out of that, that is obviously going to have an effect.”

He deflects criticism that Oscar campaigning in the trades has gotten out of hand.

“The promotion that goes on in the trades is a way of generating a lot of interest [in the awards] in newspapers, Entertainment Weekly, the ‘Today’ show, all around Europe and the world. It’s a cascading concept. It kind of starts with the trades. If you diminish the role the trades play in this promotion, maybe less people will go to see the movies. There will be less energy, less heat.”

The Los Angeles Times’ advertising department refused to comment for this article. The New York Times did not respond to a request for an interview.