IMDB says hello. Anyway a big factor I think you're overlooking is whether the movies have any appeal beyond the art house. The only Best Picture nod that's doing well is Slumdog, which is basically a new twist on the old rags-to-riches tale. The others are just barely breaking even because frankly they're out of touch with consumers. Milk is pure art-house fare; mainstream audiences have grown tired of lame political movies (which lets face it, is the main reason it's in the running). Ditto for Frost/Nixon--even though it's not a hit-piece, politics are poison because there's been way too many bad ones lately. The Reader is too serious for its own good, and Button was far too expensive for what it was. As of this writing Reader, Milk and Frost/Nixon are all still more than $6 million in the hole and Button is probably negative when you throw in the Oscar blitz.
The problem seems to be that the Academy has made clear in recent years that only 'serious movies' that address real-world issues in a way the Academy likes will be considered. Whatever happened to fun movies like Ben-Hur and The Godfather getting the glory?
Oscar's High Price
What's a best picture nomination worth?
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About a month ago, the studio behind Frost/Nixon blitzed the Hollywood trade papers with ads for the movie. Within two weeks, according to Oscar wonk David Carr, Variety ran five full-page ads for Frost/Nixon. If we're reading Variety's ad-rate card correctly, Universal Studios blew at least $72,000 for each of those ads—more than $350,000 total, not to mention the four front-pagers for Frost/Nixon that ran in the Hollywood Reporter. This outlay, of course, was a small pittance compared with the advertising campaign mounted on TV, radio, and the Internet. All of this to reach the academy—a group of 5,810 people who control the fate of the industry's pinnacle of achievement: the Oscar.
On Thursday morning, all those ads appeared to pay off for Universal. Frost/Nixon was nominated alongside four other films for best picture. The other nominees—Slumdog Millionaire, The Reader, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and Milk—all spent lavishly on their own campaigns. But so did a host of other movies—Gran Torino, The Dark Knight, Wall-E—that fell short of the cherished best picture nomination.
These campaigns aren't cheap. Estimates put the cost at tens of millions of dollars, which is especially glaring when you consider that for some of these films, advertising budgets are right up there with production costs. Yet nobody seems to question whether it's worth all the trouble in the first place. Even if a movie is lucky enough to get a best picture nod, does it really justify the campaigning expense it took to secure the nomination? How much money, exactly, is a best picture nomination worth at the box office, anyway?
We'll get to how we calculated that in a moment; first, let's explain the less quantitative force at play: buzz. When a movie is nominated for best picture, it extends its stay both in theaters and in the public consciousness for at least another month. (The awards ceremony is usually about a month after nominations are announced.) That means more late-night talk show interviews, more profile pieces about what an actor is really like when the cameras stop, and more willingness from mainstream theaters to play an art-house film.
It's a crucial truism: The more theaters that are willing to play your movie, the more money it can make. Many pictures time their wide release campaign around the Oscar nominations to capitalize on the buzz as much as possible. Million Dollar Baby added 1,863 theaters to its reach the weekend after it was nominated. This year, Slumdog Millionaire is trying this strategy. After the nominations were announced on ABC, the first commercial was for Slumdog. At the end of the spot, the narrator promised it would open in wide release Friday. Despite what the movie would suggest, that kind of timing isn't fate; it's shrewd marketing.
Others ramp up their theater count as buzz builds around who is going to get the nomination in the first place. Atonement, for example, picked up 700 theaters in 2008 by the time nominations were announced. Infamously, Dreamgirls tried to do this but got snubbed by the academy and saw its per-theater gross plummet. Instead of expanding into noisy buzz, Dreamgirls found itself singing into the vacuum. And still others, like Babel, return to wide-release post-nomination—already having been in wide-release earlier in their life cycles.
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