Oscar bait is a term used in the film community for movies that appear to have been produced for the sole purpose of winning or attempting to win Academy Awards, or "Oscars", as they are commonly known. They are usually released just in advance of Oscar season, late in the calendar year, to meet the minimum eligibility requirements for the awards and be fresh in the minds of voters from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The prestige or acclaim the studio may receive from the nomination or award is often secondary to the increased box office receipts such a film may garner; some films may even be depending on it to turn a profit.
Films seen as Oscar bait often have distinct characteristics. Lavishly produced epic-length period drama and war films, often set against tragic and historical events, are frequently seen this way and often contend for the technical Oscars such as cinematography, makeup and hairstyling, costume design or production design.
The explicit use of the Oscar nominations as a promotional strategy dates to 1978, but the term has been used in discussions of films since at least 1942, and studios have always tended to release at least some films that bait Oscar voters near the end of the year. In December 1978, with the first ever example of a targeted awards strategy of its kind, Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter was shown only to limited audiences heavy with Oscar voters and critics for just long enough to be eligible, and then went into wide release after the nominations were announced. It ultimately won that year's Best Picture Oscar along with four others. Studios emulated the strategy in later years, and in the early 21st century the term has come into wide use among both filmmakers and viewers.
Films termed "Oscar bait" are not always successful. Many films that appear to be made with the overt intent of gaming the system by pandering to the perceived biases of Academy voters have instead received no nominations at all. Audiences have in turn avoided those films in favor of those that did receive nominations. In a 2014 study of 3,000 films released since 1985, two UCLA professors identified the 1990 film Come See the Paradise as the most deliberately targeted for the Oscars. Despite generally positive reviews, it received no nominations from the Academy and failed at the box office.
History Early years From the first Oscars, there were instances of films whose initial, limited release at the end of a year was meant to qualify it for Academy consideration before a wider release. In 1933, MGM released the Greta Garbo classic Queen Christina in New York City and Los Angeles the week after Christmas, expanding it to more cities once 1934 began. Six years later, it did the same with Gone with the Wind, which went on to win the Best Picture Oscar at the 12th Academy Awards.
"Oscar bait" was used in a critical 1948 review of John Ford's Fort Apache in The New Republic that ends with the sentence "Postcards are supposed to be sent through the mail; flashed self-consciously on the screen, they look like Oscar bait." The New York Times used it in a 1955 article about the then-upcoming The Harder They Fall, Humphrey Bogart's final film. A 1968 ad for The Lion in Winter quoted from a review in Cosmopolitan praising the performances of Peter O'Toole and Katharine Hepburn as "Oscar bait outings."
These all referred to films or performances that, while they might attract the attention of Academy voters, were not explicitly made with them in mind. But also in 1948, the Supreme Court of the United States's decision in United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc., forbidding the studios from owning theater chains, changed the film industry profoundly. With their pictures no longer guaranteed to have an adequate theatrical run, and television beginning to offer competition, the studios had to rely increasingly on marketing to make films profitable. Thus their release patterns began following the calendar even more closely than they already had.
The Deer Hunter The first film to seek Oscar nominations as a deliberate marketing strategy was 1978's The Deer Hunter. After a disastrous test screening of the lengthy Vietnam War epic in Detroit, Universal turned to another producer, Allan Carr, with both Broadway and Hollywood experience, for advice on how to successfully market a depressing film. Carr realized that, with such a grim subject and brutal depictions of war and torture, the only way viewers would seek the film out was if it had been nominated for Academy Awards. Carr, once the producers had hired him as a consultant, arranged for two two-week screenings at a single theater in New York and Los Angeles before the year ended, the minimum requirements for Oscar eligibility at that time. The audiences were limited to critics and Academy members. After that, Universal pulled the film from distribution save for some showings on Z Channel, a boutique cable network that catered to film enthusiasts with showings of rare, arty movies and exclusive director's cuts of more popular ones. "We will cultivate the right audience," Carr promised. "The Deer Hunter is an Oscar winner!"
When the Oscar nominations were announced, The Deer Hunter received nine. It was immediately put into wide release with advertising and publicity materials drawing attention to the nominations. Ultimately it won five, including Best Picture. "It's a common pattern today," said Thom Mount, then president of Universal, years later. "But it was unheard of in 1978. Now everybody does it." Critic Ty Burr agrees: "The practice is the equivalent of a triumphant slam dunk in the final seconds, and it often wins the game," he wrote in a 2013 New York Times Magazine article.
1980s to present During the 1980s, as Hollywood moved away from director-driven films like The Deer Hunter, focusing on repeating the success of summer blockbusters like Jaws and Star Wars (both of which had also been nominated for Best Picture), independent filmmakers refined Carr's methods of exploiting the Oscars. Merchant Ivory, who produced lavish costume dramas, often based on novels by Henry James or E. M. Forster, began to time their releases to align with the awards season. Their 1985 adaptation of Forster's A Room with a View won three of the eight Oscars it was nominated for.
By 1991 the modern film-release calendar, in which studios released the movies they had the highest Oscar hopes for in autumn and December, was set. Independent-film mogul Harvey Weinstein sought prestige for his productions through Oscars; it culminated in a 1998 Best Picture for Shakespeare in Love, another costume drama. Similar strategies to The Deer Hunter brought Weinstein's company another Best Picture in 2010 for The King's Speech, starring Colin Firth, who got his start in Merchant Ivory's 1980s films. Use of the term "Oscar bait" in the media began to increase in the mid-1990s to a 2004 peak, after which it has remained stable.
Statistical analyses A study by Gabriel Rossman and Oliver Schilke, two sociologists at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), reviewed data from the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), such as genres and plot keywords, for 3,000 movies released between 1985 and 2009 to see what elements were likeliest to draw Oscar nominations. The researchers found that war movies, historical epics, and biographies earned the most. Plot elements of political intrigue, disabilities, war crimes and show business were also very common elements of nominated films. A release during Oscar season, or by an independent division of a major studio were also strong indicators. The study found that some keywords had a strongly negative correlation with Oscar nominations, such as "zombie", "breast implant" and "black independent film".
According to the study, the movie that scored the highest and thus was the most blatant Oscar bait among the films surveyed was Come See the Paradise, directed by Alan Parker and released by 20th Century Fox in 1990. It received that score for the previous Best Director Oscar nominations of Parker (Midnight Express, Mississippi Burning), its setting in Hollywood (the protagonist, played by Dennis Quaid, is a projectionist) and its depiction of a tragic historical event (his Japanese American wife and children are interned) against the background of World War II and racism. It was only released in a few cities during the last week of that year to make it eligible for the awards. However, it was not nominated for any. Second and third were The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003), which equalled 1959's Ben-Hur and 1997's Titanic by winning eleven trophies at the 76th Academy Awards including Best Picture, and The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996), which earned two nods at the 69th Academy Awards but won neither. At the low end, the movie in that period which least qualified as Oscar bait was the 2006 remake of 1979's When a Stranger Calls, followed by Hotel for Dogs (2009) and Barbershop 2: Back in Business (2004). None of the three least Oscar-bait films was indeed nominated for any Academy Awards.
Rossman and Schilke used their data to develop an algorithm that could predict how many Oscar nominations a film would get, based on its similarities to other recent Oscar nominees. It did not take sophisticated statistical analysis, they noted—Entertainment Weekly had for many years correctly predicted the Oscar nominees. Using data on how much the films had cost to make, they treated the system of nominating as a Tullock lottery to determine the studios' rate of return on their investments. They found that while Oscar-nominated films do indeed get at least a small bonus in ticket sales, directly proportional to the number of nominations, films with what they called "Oscar appeal" took a loss when they did not get any nominations.
"We've found that audiences don't like the kinds of aesthetics that are characteristic of Oscar-worthy movies," Rossman said. "The movies tend to be serious and depressing, and audiences don't like that, so making Oscar-y movies is a riskier strategy than the average moviegoer might appreciate." As for the payoff a movie gets when it receives nominations, "[a]udiences don't like the kind of movies that get Oscars, but they do like the Oscars," he said. The economic bonus from getting nominations or winning compensated for the losses of not doing so.
A year earlier, Ira Kalb, a professor of marketing at the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business, had done research into how big the Oscar payoff could be for a victorious film. "When used in marketing campaigns, this validation stamp increases the desire of moviegoers to see the films and the talent being honored," he wrote in a Business Insider article. "It also keeps the movies in theaters longer boosting box office receipts. And it substantially increases DVD, streaming, download, and cable TV revenues."
He used the 2010 Best Picture winner, The King's Speech, as his primary example. Before being nominated, it was expected to make about $30 million in worldwide box office receipts. After it received 12 nominations that year, the most of any film in contention, that estimate was revised upward to $200 million. "[A]n Academy Award nomination can boost ticket sales by one-third and cause a jump in the DVD sales of movies no longer in theaters," wrote Kalb. Winning increases the reward even further. As a result of its win, The King's Speech was expected to bring in revenues of almost half a billion dollars. (, it has grossed $414 million.)