Will Early Release Dates for ‘Barbie’ and ‘Past Lives’ Help or Hurt Their Oscar Chances?
variety.comWhitney Friedlander In Hollywood, the only thing more fun than setting the status quo is disrupting it. Studios have traditionally released so-called prestige films in the fall and winter so that they would be fresh on the minds of Academy and guild members during voting season.
But A24’s Oscar success with “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” which debuted at SXSW a full year before it won the best picture trophy in March, has challenged that conventional wisdom.
This year’s labor strife has further scrambled awards strategies, keeping talent on the publicity sidelines for many big contenders.
Michael Schulman, author of the behind-the-scenes tell-all “Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears,” notes that the summer blockbuster season emerged in the ’70s with the release of “Jaws” and “Star Wars,” helping to establish “the idea that summer movies were for genre movies andthen fall and winter were for serious stuff.” But the focus on late-year releases did not begin then. “Even if you go back to the early decades, you can see that studios would sometimes slip something in at the end of the year to try to get Oscar attention,” Schulman says, noting that the Academy’s current structure of only honoring films from the previous calendar year only started with the seventh ceremony in 1935.
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