"For Your Consideration"

Today, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announces the names of this year’s Oscar nominees. All the big Hollywood noses are being blown, promotional machinery has moved up to war-alert status, and strung-out studio publicists break down and cry on streetcorners for no reason at all. Scared? You should be.

So what exactly determines who gets an Oscar nomination? A favourable release date, picture prestige, momentum, studio hype, liberal sentiment, distributor intimidation, greased palms—and of course a consensus among a body of film craftspeople that someone actually deserves an award based on their work in a given film. This last, needless to say, happens very rarely.

For strict entertainment value, though, nothing tops the last-ditch struggle waged every year in the January issues of Variety magazine for the hearts and groins of Academy members—the notorious “For Your Consideration” studio advertisements. Here, the level of hyperbole climbs to a pitch that’s shameless even by Hollywood standards. For example:

Full page. Dark background. Portraits of Denzil Washington, Gene Hackman and Tony Scott surround a menacing, scarlet-tinged submarine. “For Your Consideration” the text reads, “for best picture—Crimson Tide” 

Crimson Tide? That can of cold-war surplus naval-beef that sank with all hands last spring? Yup, and a lot more consideration is asked as well: best actor (twice), direction, cinematography, sound, editing... 12 categories altogether. It's like Billy Ray Cyrus has just asked to play Roy Thompson Hall with the Toronto Symphony.

Farther along in the same issue, 12 Monkeys wants 12 nominations. An ad for Seven suggests it deserves 14. Both propose something for Brad Pitt, and it ain’t speech therapy. A host of marginally decent films use what might be called the cluster-bomb approach—if you fire enough bullets, maybe something will fall over. Ergo, Restoration suggests it merits 12 nominations, The Crossing Guard 14, While You Were Sleeping 10, Othello 15, Smoke 13, A Month by the Lake 12, Muriel’s Wedding 10. All of course will deign to be candidates for Best Picture.

After a while it’s a relief to come upon a movie that admits it just might not qualify for the big one, like Casper. Instead, (for your consideration...) how about best director, actor, actress, supporting players, visual effects, art direction—maybe a Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award for whoever did Eric Idle’s makeup. All in all, a mere 14 categories.

Why is all this hype so endearing? Part of it is the sheer rigidity of the model: “for your consideration” is ubiquitous among the ads, yet it seems hopelessly arcane, a Mafioso attempting Shakespearean English. Read enough of them, and your thoughts assume the same pattern. (“For your consideration, the forced sterilization of Mickey Rourke”)

(Actually, in making their pitch for Thelma and Louise a few years back, MGM tried to break out of this convention: “MGM proudly draws the Academy’s attention to the following individual achievements,” it read—and then dumped the names of two-thirds of the cast and crew into 17 categories. It didn’t help: aside from an award for the screenplay, T&L came away empty-handed, and MGM has mostly toed the conventional line ever since.)

Part of the allure is just the breathtaking arrogance of some studio visions. If the universe were to unfold as, say, Disney would have it, this year’s best picture nominations would all be Disney Films: Crimson Tide, Toy Story, While You Were Sleeping, Unstrung Heroes, and Mr Holland’s Opus or Nixon, depending on which way the wind is blowing. If you include the Disney subsidiary Miramax, they’re pushing 14 titles for best picture—that’s enough cluster-bomb to turn the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion into a Highway of Death.

But mostly it’s the charm of somebody making a hopeless pitch for a rotten product. Last year, Universal pitched Jon Avnet’s The War—I’d forgotten it, too—for every Oscar category there was, except maybe Best Animated Short. Net nominations? Zero. This year, Universal has pitched Waterworld for 11 awards, including best picture. Why did they stop there? Why not Kevin Costner for Best Actor—hell, if you’re sending that rocket all the way to Neptune, why not have it visit Pluto as well?

Ultimately, you have to wonder just how successful any of this tub-thumping can really be. It’s one thing to gently remind academy members of a good performance they may have forgotten; (“for your consideration: Kathy Bates, Best Actress for Dolores Clayborne”) it’s quite another to debase the coinage beyond recognition (“for your consideration: Sabrina, Best Picture”).

In 1992, six studios pitched 19 films in Variety for a total of 204 nominations. They got 31, three resulting in actual awards. Last year, eight studios pitched 25 films for 234 nominations. Result: 26 nominations, 4 Oscars. Slim pickings, and when you think of it, even if you always know when the pitch fails, you can never really know if it worked—you might have gotten the award without the ad. So why do it? Well, because just like chicken soup or beta carotene, it probably won’t help, but it just might!

This year, eight studios pitched 40 movies for 370 nominations. In a fall as full of lousy movies as 1995’s was, the studios obviously think anything can happen. Scared? I sure am.

—Published in the Globe and Mail, 1996