an offbeat year for the oscars

Oscar noms came out today and it made me realize I just don’t go to the movies anymore. In the major categories of Actor, Supporting Actor, Actress, Supporting Actress, Best Director and Best Film, I’ve seen a total of two movies: Little Miss Sunshine and The Pursuit of Happyness. And Pursuit is the only one we saw in a theater.

Scanning the list of top box office earners for 2006 doesn’t give us a whole lot of Oscar bait; the top ten films are straight up popcorn fare (though the 2005 top ten wasn’t much different). Last years nominees just felt more fun, mostly because you couldn’t turn on the internets without getting a Brokeback joke in your face. But we also had Crash, Munich, Capote, Walk the Line and Cinderella Man. Big movies with big stars.

Looking at the Best Picture category this year give us Brad’s Babel, Leo’s Departed, Steve Carrell’s Sunshine, Eastwood’s Iwo Jima (they nominated the Japanese edition of his two-part epic!) and The Queen.

Plenty of big names there I guess, but as of today The Departed is the only one to break the $100mil mark, with $123 milion in box office receipts. The others aren’t even close. It seems like just yesterday they were handing out awards to mega movies like Forrest Gump, Titanic, Gladiator, American Beauty and Lord of the Rings.

I’ve always made a point to watch the Oscars, something that stems from a family ritual when I was a kid. I don’t like football. I hate American Idol. But I do like the Oscars. And part of the fun is rooting for films I enjoyed, or booing films I didn’t. I think most people who watch the Oscars feel the same way I do. People like their Oscar scorecards.

The Oscars have typically been a huge ratings draw, but that draw depends on an audience tuning in to root for their favorite team. With so many people using projection based home theater setups (like we do) or gigantic HDTVs, there’s little incentive to go to a theater to pay $25 for a movie and popcorn. And I LOVE seeing movies in a theater! Love it. But the alternative is much more affordable and much more convenient. As the theatrical and DVD window closes, waiting a few months makes a lot of sense.

One of the strategies of getting your film nominated (besides a killer marketing campaign) is releasing it to theaters just in time for nominations. That way it’s fresh in the heads of the nominators. The downside for the Oscar producers is that most people (like me) wait for the DVD, which means no one has seen any of the nominated films (like me). Ratings dip from lack of interest. Hollywood panics and blames interent piracy. Every DVD we rent or buy has an anti-piracy commercial that we can’t skip through, just so we can watch a movie that we paid for. The MPAA gets revenue hungry and starts suing people. There are fires in the streets.

When did I start ranting?

The full nomination list is here.