I found this on EW.com in which Dave Karger poses this question: Should box office affect the Oscars?

I thought that this might be an interesting discussion for us.

I think that in the case of TDK it definitely should. TDK proves that it was a stellar film because of repeat audiences. People wanted to watch this great film over and over again.

TDK should be in the discussion of Best Picture nominations and win.

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Should box office affect the Oscars?
Dec 29, 2008, 05:01 PM | by Dave Karger

Categories: Best Picture

This weekend's box office results bring up a perennial question: Does a movie need to be a commercial hit to score a Best Picture nomination? Certainly poor box office performance helped kill movies like Memoirs of a Geisha and The Kite Runner in the past, while blockbusters like The Sixth Sense and The Fugitive capitalized on their financial success to earn Oscar nods.

This weekend, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button performed strongly with almost $40 million in its first four days, a fantastic figure for what is essentially an art film (granted, one starring Brad Pitt) with a nearly three-hour running time. Meanwhile, Frost/Nixon, despite earning rave reviews, has posted decent but not terrific numbers, grossing $1.5 million over the three-day portion of the weekend in 205 theaters. Despite playing in one-fifteenth the number of theaters as Button, its per-theater average was still the lower of the two. I've had a couple friends wonder if the soft box office means Frost has moved down a few pegs in the Best Picture race. Perhaps it's now the No. 4 contender instead of No. 3 (Milk, which has been doing well in limited release, is on the rise), but I still think it's solidly in there for a nomination next month.

The question is, should it make a difference? Whether or not The Dark Knight ends up snagging the fifth slot may just provide the answer.

What do you think?

Is the box office reflecting attendence at academy screenings? Where is that report? Plus with everyone getting screeners they don't even have to go to academy screenings. I guess really only studio executives that are academy members would really care about box office. The past few years it is obvious box office did not matter. MOAG and Kite Runner were killed because of bad reviews not so so box office. MOAG did like 50 or 60 million which was fine.

I'm sorry what's MOAG?

This message has been edited. Last edited by: caresa,

Memoirs of a Geisha.

I always wondered why BO receipts mattered in the Oscars game. Aren't the Oscars suppose to reward nominees based on Quality, not the quantity of ticket sales?

And based on the types of movies that make it to #1 and lots of money, I wouldn't want to use the general public's box office interest as a gauge to determine what film or which actor/actress gets a nomination.

I haven't seen Australia yet, but to use its 'lack luster' box office returns against its Oscar nom chances is just stupid!

quote:

Originally posted by BTN:
Memoirs of a Geisha.

Thank you.

In terms of this discussion, I think that if the film is of a great quality and has the BO draw, I don't think the BO factor should be a mark Against a film in garnering a BP like that of TDK.

I still remember the hesistation of The Academy to acknowledge Titanic in nominating it as Best Picture. But they did nominate it because of the enormous BO that it made and rewarded it with the Best Picture.

Movies like Frost/Nixon and The Reader need to do well at the Golden Globes to get that attention again because their box office has been stinking. Doubt, The Wrestler and Gran Torino have been soaring and I think their chances have improved in BP race...

quote:

Originally posted by caresa:
In terms of this discussion, I think that if the film is of a great quality and has the BO draw, I don't think the BO factor should be a mark Against a film in garnering a BP like that of TDK.

I still remember the hesistation of The Academy to acknowledge Titanic in nominating it as Best Picture. But they did nominate it because of the enormous BO that it made and rewarded it with the Best Picture.

Good point. Like GoBlue! I certainly wouldn't want the Academy Awards to turn into something like the People's Choice Awards. However, I do feel that there's a middle ground otherwise I do worry that the Oscars will become irrelevant.

I think part of the problem is that not everyone gets a chance to see these movies because they all seem to come out at the same time, and with limited screen space, a lot of these smaller films only hang around a few weeks at most if even that, and normal people don't have a chance to go see them in the movies' limited runs.

There's been some great ideas that I've seen out there on how to try to stop this from happening to hopefully get more people seeing these movies, so that there's not just these two big categories anymore of big budget film only made to make money regardless of quality and the second category of big budget film only made to win Oscars which the studio invests billions of dollars in order to win but never makes that money back even if it does win some kind of Academy Award. I think that big budget movies like The Dark Knight and like Spider Man 2 or even Iron Man showed that Hollywood can make a quality movie that audiences will go see over and over again instead of the usual crap that they just expect people to go see because they advertise the hell out of it. Further, I think that movies that do well at Oscar time can appeal to more people if they only had more chances of seeing them before they were released on DVD which unfortunately usually happens after the Oscars are over, which means that viewers aren't invested in the show if they haven't seen any of the nominees.

In fact, Nathaniel at The Film Experience has just written a great post about this December problem, and how it's gotten so much worse over the years.

Box office shouldn't be a consideration - either way. It shouldn't be an argument for a movie - or against a movie.

However to open that can of worms further, nothing should be a consideration outside the very quality of the movie itself. Genre should not matter, the number of actors shouldn't matter, the question whether the director is a "jerk" shouldn't matter.

In a perfect world a body of people consisting mostly of actors should be ready and willing to hand over the Best Picture award to WALL-E - a movie where the main villain was voiced by a MacinTalk, a computer program.

For some reason I don't think we live in that perfect world. And so a lot of things will matter that shouldn't matter. Box office is one these things, although I suspect it matters less than genre.

If they conside BO, they must do an analisis not only based on BO, theres another factors of quality that may reflect the viewers reactions or something like that... There`s per screen average, percentage of drops week after week, and on and on...

This going to be total fanboy of me and I don't care, ppl are going to watch if TDK is nom for BP.