Oscars Ephemera: does Hollywood have a plan for saving the awards bait film?

ALSO: my Top 7 most forgettable Oscar nominees for streaming services

While the great and good of Hollywood’s glitterati were gathering in Los Angeles, I was schlepping about south London with my dog. Headphones in, I heard the strains of Lana Del Rey’s ‘The Greatest’ come on my Spotify shuffle. “L.A. is in flames, it's getting hot,” the American crooner sings, her trademark drawl illuminating this 2019 album track. “Kanye West is blond and gone/ Life on Mars ain't just a song/ Oh, the live stream's almost on…”

Six years later, the words feel joltingly prophetic. This year’s Oscars, held at the Dolby Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard and hosted by omnipresent talk show legend Conan O’Brien, has been overshadowed by the fires that have swept across California. The film industry – so vital to the state’s productivity and position in the world – has been engulfed in a cloud of literal and metaphorical smoke. Film matters, the industry has been repeatedly saying, yet lives and homes matter far more. “The people of Los Angeles have clearly been through a devastating time,” O’Brien told the assembled A-list. “In moments such as this, any awards show can seem self-indulgent and superfluous, but what I want to have us do is remember why we gathered here tonight.” And why had they gathered there? To try and save cinema, duh!

Anora was the night’s big winner, to such an extent that no other film could really generate a narrative from the evening. Sean Baker’s romp through the colliding worlds of strippers and oligarchs scooped Best Film, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Editing and a (slightly surprising) Best Actress win for its star Mikey Madison, who has been jettisoned into Tinseltown’s elite with just her first leading role. The film is great, a triumph for prestige films that resist taking themselves too seriously. And with a reported budget of just $6m, it is another huge success for its distributor Neon, which is like a less-sexy A24, having pushed out moderate indie hits like Portrait of a Lady on Fire, The Worst Person in the World and Triangle of Sadness, as well as Parasite, which picked up the top award in 2020. But is Anora the saviour of cinema or just another symptom of its decline?

Anora made $14,146,804 at the US box office in 2024, its year of release (it will do several million dollars worth of new business now, I’m sure), making it the 85th most commercially successful film, in the US (it was 77th worldwide), in 2024. (To date, it has done a reported $15,683,234 in pre-Oscar win business). This is in stark contrast to last year’s winner, Oppenheimer, which did $326,101,370 of domestic, year-of-release, business, making it the 5th biggest taking film of the year. But Oppenheimer was a very rare thing – a ‘serious’ movie that played like a blockbuster, directed by a man beloved of the Box Office – and an unfair comparison. But how do Anora’s takings compare to the other Best Picture winners of the last decade?

• 2023 winner: Everything Everywhere All at Once, $73,902,524

• 2022 winner: CODA, no data.

• 2021 winner: Nomadland, $2,143,000

• 2020 winner: Parasite, $36,119,186

• 2019 winner: Green Book, $69,645,701

• 2018 winner: The Shape of Water, $57,895,979

• 2017 winner: Moonlight, $22,386,985

• 2016 winner: Spotlight, $39,289,249

• 2015 winner: Birdman, $37,780,892

These are the US Box Office receipts of the Best Picture winners up to the moment of them winning the top gong at the Dolby. You can discount Nomadland, which was released during the Covid-19 pandemic, when people were only sketchily allowed to attend cinemas. You might also like to discount CODA, which was released simultaneously on AppleTV+ with only the requisite theatrical run to qualify for the Oscars in the US, and a negligible cinematic distribution internationally. Minus those two, it’s clear that Anora is, by the Academy’s standards, not a big hit with moviegoers. The trend is simple: Everything Everywhere All at Once and Green Book are slight outliers as the most crowd-pleasing to the popcorn-munching crowds who pack megaplexes. At the other end of the scale, Moonlight is possibly the most heralded winner on this list, artistically, but scarcely broke the $20m threshold. There is a clear sweet-spot for Oscar winners: $35-40m.

Let’s call $35,000,000 the magic number. It’s enough to generate a buzz around your film, and probably a demonstration that it has the sort of star power that the Academy, with their love of glamour, might reward. It’s also small enough to demonstrate that the film has artistic credentials, and isn’t just lowest common denominator fare for the unwashed masses. The three films on this list who’ve hit the magic number have had budgets that make the figure a modest success, a sliver over break-even (Budgets: Spotlight, $20m; Birdman, $18m; Parasite, $11.4m). With the boost to box office receipts and then lucrative streaming deals, the Best Picture Oscar will have turned each of them from financially ambivalent to positively lucrative.

In 2015, when Birdman came out, 74 films reached $35m at the US Box Office. In 2016, when Spotlight came out, 82 films reached that milestone. In 2024, just 47 films reached the magic number and made $35m at the US Box Office.

(In 2020, 17 films made $35m – but, you know, the pandemic…).

Cinema is a shrinking art form. Overall box office receipts might have stabilised since the shock of the pandemic, but fewer films are making that money. Ticket sales are homogenising around big marquee films. They’re usually sequels or continuations of existing IP: such is the case with all the top 14 highest-grossing films of 2024, all the way through to It Ends With Us (which has been a real triumph! *5 seconds later* We regret to inform you the triumph is a disaster).

In this world where cinema is an increasingly rarified medium, it’s more important than ever that the Oscars reflect the diversity of projects still being undertaken. Last night’s victory for Anora should turbocharge its performance, both in cinemas and as a home box office product. It should also result in the green-lighting of half a dozen similar products, cheaper films that get massive studio backing with their awards campaign. But the reality is that the Oscars can do very little to arrest the trends of modern cinema. Oppenheimer aside, most of the Best Picture winners of the last decade have been either inconsequential or unprofitable. Art is in a tug o’ war with business, and, at the moment, that stalemate is allowing video games and TikToking and podcasting and opiates to come skipping right by.

In order to improve the quality of the best films being made, we need more films to be made. It’s simple mathematics. In order for more films to be made, we need more films to make money. That’s also simple mathematics. In under a decade we’ve gone from almost 100 films a year making $35m to fewer than 50. If that trend remains stable or gets worse, a whole tier of English-language filmmaking is going to be obliterated. But for more films to make money, cinemas need to programme a greater range of films – and with bums on seats harder to come by than ever, there’s little incentive to do that. Screenings are packed out for Inside Out 2 or Wolverine vs Deadpool, whereas they might be half full (in a 30-seater) for Anora. There’s simple mathematics at play there too. But there’s no sense that public bodies in the US or UK will ever support the dying cinema industry, nor that studios are inclined to give much of a break to beleaguered chains. They are being pushed into location closures, screen reductions and a consolidation of releases around fewer, more guaranteed titles. The result is that I think it’s plausible that, in another 5 years or so, we could have fewer than 30 films in the US reaching that magic number, $35,000,000.

And so the Oscars becomes ephemeral. It rewards, increasingly, films that few people have seen. Streaming services, who grappled for credibility in the early days of their original programming and went hard for awards bait projects have largely shelved that ambition. They focus now – like theatrical distributors – on propositions with a higher % conversion to subscribers. A film like CODA, which mysteriously won Best Picture a couple of years ago, has been all but forgotten. Nomadland, too, recedes into the rearview mirror. When the fates convene a prospect that has both audience and Academy attention, like Oppenheimer, it feels like a unicorn, not a horse (not even a zebra).

Hollywood has to fix this broken system. The consequence would not only be the consolidation of almost all box office revenue with Disney, and, to a lesser extent, Universal, Warner Bros, Paramount and Sony (who collectively distributed every film in the Top 23 last year, other than Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes), but a needless kneecapping of the creative and industrial possibilities of cinema. No Anora means no Anora, but it also means no Mikey Madison stardom, no opportunity to cast her as Sue Storm or Catwoman or whatever some Hollywood mogul has planned. The $35m movie is a vital part of the ecosystem.

But if people haven’t seen the film, then it doesn’t matter what awards you garland it with. It will fade away. And the more forgettable or forgotten films that light up Oscar night, the more the evening will cease to be a last, best hope against the sweeping tsunami of blockbusters.

Below the line for subscribers. My first listicle: the Top 7 Most Forgettable Oscar Bait Movies from Streaming’s Brief Flirtation with Awards Credibility!