by Gregg Kilday
LOS ANGELES (The Hollywood Reporter) --- Is Hollywood ready for a shorter Oscar season?
The Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences thinks so. Last Tuesday it voted to explore moving the annual Oscar ceremonies to a date in late February, possibly beginning as early as 2004 (HR 6/28). And throughout Hollywood initial reactions to plans to compress the Oscar season -- which now runs nearly three months from the end of December, when final qualifying films are released, to the end of March, when the awards are announced -- appear to be generally favorable.
"I haven't had time to digest it yet, but without spending any time really analyzing it, I think it would be smart to shorten the length of the campaigns," said Terry Curtin, head of marketing and distribution at Revolution Studios, who in her previous position as head of publicity at Universal Pictures was involved in the hard-fought campaign on behalf of the Oscar-winning A Beautiful Mind. "A shorter campaign would charge members with voting on the merits of a movie and that is how it should be handled. It could also level the playing field for those movies that can't launch expensive campaigns."
"I really hope it happens, I'm a strong proponent of it," said Marvin Levy, a member of the board of governors and an executive at DreamWorks. "If you could cut a month off (the campaigns), you don't have to keep running ads, doing things like special events, keeping the campaign alive, so to speak. You're going to save a lot of money. Right now, even movies that open in December, by the time get you get to March, the voters have seen so many doubletruck ads that they tend to get tired of it all."
"What the board basically discussed was the notion of exploring the feasibility and possibility of moving the show into February 2004," Academy spokesperson Leslie Unger confirmed Friday. "Obviously, with a show of the magnitude of ours, there are many pieces that are part of the puzzle. Moving the show would require a number of things to change. The nominations date would probably also change, but I don't know that that level of detail has been flushed out yet."
Any change would not occur next year. The date for next year's 75th annual Academy Awards is already set for March 23.
Several factors have led to the push for moving the Oscar date.
This past year's contentious Oscar contest, which included a subterranean whisper campaign directed at a Beautiful Mind, convinced many observers, several of them inside the Oscar process, that campaigns need to be curtailed.
"Between you and me, it all goes on too long," said one veteran Oscar campaigner who declined to be named. "This year, the media focused on the Oscar campaigns more than ever. March is really quite a long ways from December, and I think it even becomes hard on the membership of the Academy."
Another factor is the Oscar broadcast's shrinking ratings. Although the 74th annual Academy Awards, broadcast by ABC on March 24, ranked as that week's top program in viewers and adults 18-49, its 16.1 rating/39 share in adults 18-49 were the lowest demo marks for the awards show in recent history. The Whoopi Goldberg-hosted broadcast also posted the lowest household rating (25.4) for an Oscar telecast and the second- lowest household share (42).
A shift to February, though, could move the Oscar telecast into the heavily-promoted February sweep ratings period and also allow it to leapfrog some of the competing awards shows that appear to be stealing some of its thunder.
"There's been a lot of pressure to make a change," one studio marketing head said. "The thing has come to a head over the ratings for the show. If you have sat through umpteen awards shows before the Oscars, the Oscars, which are supposed to be the pinnacle, instead are anticlimactic."
Executives at ABC, which has contracted to air the Oscars through 2008, were unavailable for comment, but one source, asked whether the network would like to air the broadcast during sweeps, reacted as though the very question answered itself.
One obstacle that the Academy is likely to encounter is that the current Oscar schedule allows for a lucrative six-week period between mid-February, when the nominations are announced, and the March awards to milk the nominations at the boxoffice. This year, A Beautiful Mind scored $41 million in ticket sales during that period, while best picture nominees Gosford Park and In the Bedroom picked up an additional $15 million each.
"I think the studios are going to hate it," another Oscar campaigner said of the proposed change. "During the period between the nominations and the Oscars, a studio can make 30 million extra dollars. What studio will want to whittle that down?"
"Those are all details that are important," said Robert Friedman, Paramount Motion Picture Group vice chairman. "But, in principal, moving it earlier is OK by us. You would still have to figure out when the nominations are announced, because the weekend prior to that is a weekend when a lot of product that has not previously gone into wide release, gets a big push."
The Academy's proposed change would also have a domino effect on the many other awards events that ride the coattails of the Academy's calendar. The Directors Guild of America, for example, has tentatively blocked two dates for its awards dinner in 2004 -- one on Feb. 7 and one on March 6. "After hearing about the possibility of the Oscars moving up, we blocked a couple of dates, because there will be a lot of competition," DGA special assignments executive Andrew Levy said.
A new date for the Oscars would not be unprecedented. The first Oscars took place on May 16, 1929. Early ceremonies took place in November. During the '60s, the awards occurred in April. The Oscars have been staged in late March since 1989, but beginning in 1999, the show was moved from Monday nights to Sunday nights.
The Academy has not established a deadline by which it must decide when the 2004 Oscars will be staged.
© 2002 The Hollywood Reporter