BoxOfficeFangrl

First group of presenters announced: Hope they don't use that font for the envelopes!

I'm only surprised The Power of the Dog is up there, since it's the Best Picture frontrunner with 12 nominations, I'd figured the fans would be content. But Cumbrrbatch has stans and PotD people get very defensive at the criticism of the movie being "inaccessible", so both groups would want to win a Twitter poll to prove something. The Fan Favorite poll is appealing to groups that need their movie to get some sort of validation it hasn't gotten already. Tick Tick Boom didn't get into Best Picture and Andrew probably won't win Best Actor, so the Garfield stans vote a ton. No Way Home is top 10 but not dominatihg like you'd expect, for its massive popularity. If half the fans are all "Screw the Academy" because of the Best Picture snub they're not going to be that enthusiastic about voting for a fake Twitter Oscar. Same story with House of Gucci. Encanto is likely to win Animated Feature and the music is everywhere: the fans already know it's a success where it counts.

I figured the ratings would go up because the movies have been seen more than last year's bunch, but the changes are only repelling their core fanbase. I still think there will be an increase and ABC will unfortunately feel vindicated. I wonder if that leaderboard would have released, had Deadline not dropped the article about Cinderella and Army of the Dead being in the lead. If they are genuinely counting the votes, better to lean into it and publicly appear to embrace the idea. It reminds me of when a talentless contestant would stick around week after week on Dancing with the Stars or American Idol and people voted harder when that person got trashed. In the end, the show stops framing them as a joke and the judges start dishing out compliments, to try to make the car crash win seem slightly more respectable. "Enthusiasm", lol.

The Academy didn't care for House of Gucci overall, it only got in for makeup. Whatever anyone thinks Leto's performance, the makeup made him look unrecognizable and AMPAS does go for that with movies even less in the Oscar wheelhouse than HoG. Anyway, how much did she really need MGM? She was doing the most on her own... Even by "actor on the Oscar trail" standards and her own antics three years ago, she was a lot this season. I honestly think she would have gotten in at the Oscars if she'd calmed down some and acted like she'd been there before.

Apple winning Best Picture before Netflix would be hilarious. They spent a lot on CODA (for what it is), but not nearly as much as Netflix has for its Oscar movies/acquisitions/campaigns through the years. People are going to dismiss the SAG Ensemble win as a Hidden Figures/Black Panther thing but CODA won an acting award as well, a big difference. It only has three nominations but all above the line. I look at Oscar stats as a correlation vs causation thing. I doubt most voters look back at the Best Editing category to remind themselves what they're "allowed" to rank #1 in Best Picture. But there's another four weeks to go, if West Side Story gets a second wind on Disney+, then it will be the new frontrunner, or Belfast if it has a good night at the BAFTAs...

Book Club meets the Super Bowl, lolwut? Anyway, it'd be more fun if it were the 2012 Super Bowl and they were the Giants fans who got into it with Gisele after the game.

For the 91st Oscars, they also tried 90 second Best Original Song performances (even when Shallow was in the mix) and not having the prior year's acting winners as presenters because they weren't "famous" enough. Everyone balked and the clownery was averted. Last year, the Best Song performances were taped and on the pre-show. Maybe since it's Billie Eilish and Beyonce and an Encanto song, they might leave that category alone. With the "performers don't have to be vaxxed" idea they floated, there's speculation that's about getting Van Morrison to show up.

Dune isn't a Disney movie, so... The Tonys show clips of the "lesser" winners during the main telecast, "spoilers" get out and it's just not the same. An Oscar's an Oscar, but... AMPAS seems desperate to be the People's Choice Awards or the MTV Movie Awards, true ratings winners these days... Maybe they can find old Blockbuster Awards footage on YouTube for show tips. A lot of big names pushed back the last time the Oscars tried cutting categories from primetime (three years ago). The reactions tomorrow once the A-list has had time to formulate their thoughts are going to be interesting... It's just a litany of poor decisions about the telecast, at what point does the overall membership throw out the people in charge over there?

The Little Monsters have seen her get nominated for Best Actress, have an iconic Oscars performance (plus other memorable ones) and win one before. They know this participation trophy is meaningless, to have Mother Monster up there accepting the Golden Hashtag on the same night that Billie Eilish or Beyonce and Kristen Stewart (potentially) win a real Oscar...would they put their girl through that? The stans of all the other actresses and pop gurls would clown her for days. Other fanbases are thirstier to see their fave succeed and wouldn't see winning this "prize" as humiliating, but a validation of their own taste. It's not surprising that stans of people/stuff that haven't won anything important before are the ones doing the most in a fan poll.

This was entirely predictable to anyone even vaguely familiar with social media. Clearly, no one in charge at ABC/AMPAS... At least I remember the 2021 Cinderella being a thing: there was some James Corden-related outrage when it dropped, but it had a good showing on the Nielsen streaming chart a few weeks later. That Johnny Depp thing? I am not really a "this movie does not exist" sort of person, but it's made to describe stuff like that...

The clips total about 25 minutes and feature very melodramatic announcing.

Wondering how many people are learning today that Colonel Parker was Dutch... "We are the same, you and I..." in the trailer, Film Twitter will really hate this even more than they were already going to.

The 2013 Gatsby has some elements I love and some that make me feel that Luhrmann really didn't get the themes of the novel. The soundtrack for this movie will be much less polarizing, though so many classics are bound to get left out. I wonder what Luhrmann is going to do to make the movie less cookie cutter than the usual music biopic, but maybe it's testing so well because it follows the formula? Can't wait to do a double bill with this and The Identical:

It never fully left theaters, this is just a re-expansion, really. This would have been ripe for a singalong edition as a box office push in the Before Times, but that's likely out between Covid and it being on Disney+ already. Surface Pressure is #10 this week.

Do they tell the winner of the Twitter Oscar in advance? What if the Little Monsters tweet their hearts out to get House of Gucci the win (pop stans are way more experienced in using Twitter engagement for awards), Mother Monster skips the show and it's, like, Maurizio's second wife accepting it?

Pretty much every other awards hopeful would've made more Pre-Covid (IMO even things like The Last Duel would still lost money but flopped less), so it stands to reason that the prestige movies doing relatively okay now could have been bigger hits in different circumstances. PTA's fanbase overlaps with the demos that have mostly returned to theaters; I wonder if the WOM for Licorice Pizza would be worse if the full awards watching audience had come back already. I watched Marry Me on Peacock Premium (thanks Cox Cable) and it's Notting Hill with a singer, but 2022 Owen Wilson is no 1999 Hugh Grant. It's not the worst rom-com I've ever seen and would've made a decent follow-up to Monster-in-Law. Marry Me never tried to pretend JLo was still 28 or whatever, but it's a scenario easier to buy with somewhat younger people. Though with the way Bennifer 2.0 has played out, maybe it's not totally unrealistic for a pampered pop diva?

All the bros mad about the No Way Home Best Picture snub will definitely tune in for Amy Schumer... /s I mean, I guess the hosts will be fine? The Twitter award (why not TikTok?) seems stupid but probably not any more distracting than Ellen passing out pizzas or that time they invaded a screening of A Wrinkle in Time. It'll be hilarious if the winner isn't even under the Disney umbrella and the idea gets quietly dumped the next year.

ERC has leaned into some sort of "box office with attitude" persona that works for Twitter engagement, I guess. I find all their takes to be harsh if not outright wrong and uniformly worthless. I wasn't in love with Licorice Pizza but if you read ERC's weekly takes, it's been the worst flop ever for a couple of months. Except the part where it's ultimately not going to make significantly less than the average PTA movie did before the pandemic, which IMO is a huge win, considering the overall box office landscape for adult dramas since 2020.

Guadagnino *and* a tennis movie? Definitely watching it, but RIP the box office...

They has trailer premieres during the telecast last year...for next year's Oscar contenders: On one hand, the audience for those movies was highly likely to be watching the Oscars. On the other hand, those weren’t exactly tentpoles that would've gotten massive trailer views, even in the before times. I mean, The Eternals ended up being a flop by MCU standards, but no one knew that last spring. A trailer premiere for it and similar tentpoles during last year's telecast would've generated some badly-needed hype. The problem is that at least some of the Oscar purist snobs would throw a fit about trailers for those "theme park spectacles" sullying their sacred celebration of "cinema", even if it was just during commercial breaks. AMPAS and ABC are being pulled in a lot of different directions over the Oscars and can't possibly please everyone.

I guess it just depends on what a person's looking for... I love the fashion, the seating arrangements, the odd presenter combos, seeing if the audience likes the host or not (it affects the energy of the room), and hoping for upsets/ties. The musical performances might be beautiful or cringey, the actors from the movie might sing, they might not, they might put on an unexpected display of staggering sexual chemistry... The lulls make it a great show to watch in a group or while scrolling social media. The Super Bowl lasts four hours and it draws tons of viewers who barely notice/care about the game itself. I suppose the game is less predictable than an awards show, yet when surprise winners happen at the Oscars, people complain about that, too (after previously complaining that the winners are so predictable). I guess with the Super Bowl, one difference is that people who genuinely don't care simply pay it little attention, instead of endlessly demanding the NFL fix the show to their liking. With movie award shows, it's a very different story. Can the Oscars trim the random montages and aim for a show under three and a half hours? Sure, the Emmys manage it while awarding three times as many actors. But the Oscars are still an industry gala of people in formalwear with cameras in their faces, and it doesn't aspire to be a boozefest like the Golden Globes. Of course it's going to be a little staid.

It's so weird to me that even some people who follow the awards race all year seem not to care for the Oscars as an event. It's the Super Bowl of movie awards, yet they want it to be a glorified press conference, basically. Things were different back when the Oscars were the only game in town, but they can't pass a law preventing other groups from giving out awards, too. The world changes and you have to adapt - I just think AMPAS/ABC aren't going about it in the best way. Move up the start time, get a host who doesn't have contempt for the nominees, add the show to streaming ASAP, and premiere movie trailers during the commercial breaks.

There are actors playing Little Richard, B.B. King and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, so at least the movie knows better. Test screening audiences love this and the studio seems confident. The likely audience for this hasn't been showing up to theaters in huge numbers recently, but maybe the studio has reason to think the situation will turn back around...

This news certainly won't start a guessing game or hurt anyone's chances for a win... It's technically under the new minimum guidelines from the LA Department of Health, but other precursors like SAG aren't dropping their vax requirements.

I love that he uses Don't Look Up as the example of an ultra-serious nominee. Anyway, Oscars have had "serious" nominees since the beginning? They even had a separate category for "Unique and Artistic" movies the first year. Glad he won't be hosting again. Oscar cranks tend to have the memory of a gnat and just use whatever narrative that works with the argument they're pushing at the time, even if it flies in the face of reality: "The Oscars hate comic book movies" (Joker), "They hate the MCU" (Black Panther), "They never nominate anything popular" (Bohemian Rhapsody, 1917, A Star Is Born), "Only obvious Oscar bait ever wins" (Parasite). With streaming movies, it's easier than ever to make the "nobody watches them" argument, even if the independent Nielsen figures say otherwise. Dune leads the nominations and made almost $400 miillion globally despite the HBO Max release. I would've been absolutely fine with No Way Home in Best Picture, by the way, blockbusters have made it in before, decades ago. If you're arguing that blockbusters don't really win Best Picture these days, fair enough. The Oscars are hardly perfect, but AMPAS just needs to ignore the hate-watching types who "don't care" about awards but spend countless hours complaining about them. Those people will never be satisfied and still won't really watch the show anyway. The Academy should figure out the best way to put the ceremony onto Disney+ and Hulu in real time, in addition to the ABC broadcast, I'm sure they have top lawyers who can work out something. Instead, AMPAS and ABC keep hoping they can make a few changes to the rules/ceremony and it'll get 40 million viewers again. Short of live sex on stage advertised in advance, that's not happening.