A few weeks ago, I went over the results of last year’s Contenders series and announced I would be revising those guidelines. While I did mention some of the changes I would, for certain, make. There were others I hadn’t quite settled on.
Starting next week, this year’s series will be begin. Before I get to that, I wanted to outline all the changes that would be made.
Inclusion Requirements
As with my previous article, the changes to the inclusion requirements are generally about narrowing contenders. Two of the prior items, $100 million box office and 80+ MetaCritic Score are being combined. The box office number will stay the same while the critical response score will be amended to include Rotten Tomatoes critic scores of 75% or better.
Festival Awards entry submission is limited to specific awards. The qualifying awards will be as follows:
Berlin International Film Festival: Golden Bear, Silver Bear for Best Director, Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance, Silver Bear for Best Supporting Performance, and Silver Bear for Best Screenplay.
Cannes Film Festival: Palme d’Or, Grand Prix, Best Director (Prix de la mise en scène), Best Actor (Prix d’interprétation masculine), Best Actress (Prix d’interprétation féminine), Best Screenplay (Prix du scénario), and Caméra d’Or.
Sundance Film Festival: Grand Jury Prize, Audience Award, and Directing Award
Toronto International Film Festival: People’s Choice Award
Venice International Film Festival: Golden Lion, Grand Jury Prize, Silver Lion, Special Jury Prize, Volpi Cup, and Best Screenplay.
Prediction Citation will remain the same.
Pre-Release Buzz will continue to be a catch-all category.
Precursor Citation is removed.
Contender Types
Here we’ll have a few radical changes. Rather than detailing specific changes, we’ll just outline the new set of four contender types. It borrows from box office terms. The idea is that films that can fit into a very narrow set of categories will perform differently than ones that contend in every category.
Wide Contender (includes all categories)
Limited Contender (includes picture, directing, writing, acting, casting, editing, and maybe the odd outlying category like original score, cinematography, or sound)
Craft Contender (includes tech/craft-specific categories)
Animation Contender (includes animated feature, original song, original score, sound, and rarely VFX)
Type Factors
For each of these four contender types, I have separate values set for each contributing factor (pedigree, content, release, critics, audiences). These will remain the factors I’m using but they will all be weighted differently.
All four categories weigh the critical reception for half the score. Wide and Limited contenders differ in the release strategy and audience receptions since wide contenders have to be more broadly palatable to voters than limited contenders do. They also differ in terms of content. A wide contender is beholden to its genre. A modern drama can succeed as a limited contender but won’t do as well as a wide contender. Similarly, an epic period film is going to perform better than a modern drama in the craft categories. As an example from last year, Anora‘s content mattered less than Wicked‘s in how broadly the film performed at the Oscars.
Between Craft and Animation, the factors are largely the same but with the pedigree in animation mattering more than the pedigree in craft while content was more important to craft contenders than animation contenders. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl benefited from being an Aardman production whereas Beetlejuice Beetlejuice could have coasted in on pedigree but did not. There will always be exceptions Flow and Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes for example, but that’s why critical response is more important than any other factor and which is likely what sunk Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.
Individual Factors
For this section, I’ll go more into a broad overview of changes.
Pedigree: I’m going to be a little more systematic in this regard. Most of my valuations were instinctual rather than statistically. First, I’ll be looking at editors, cinematographers, and composers a little more closely. Before, I barely regarded them. The production studio also needs to be addressed better. Certain distributors (A24, Focus, Sony Pictures Classics) need to be given more weight than studios like Roadshow Attractions and Vertical. I’m not quite sure how I’ll adjudicate that but it may require making a list of all Oscar-nominated films the distributors have generated in the recent past.
To that end, there will be two “factors” in this segment: How many past Oscar nominations/wins the collective group has received and how long ago those victories occurred. Al Pacino hasn’t been much of a contender lately despite a long list of accomplishments while Timothée Chalamet has done admirably well recently. How exactly these factors will be calculated, I’ll have to think on but suffice it to say they will be somewhat more important than they have been previously.
Content: One subfactor here that’s going the way of the dodo is Legacy factor (original vs. adapted vs. sequel). It simply doesn’t have much in the way of an impact other than issues with sequelitis, which with the exception of Furiosa seem not to be manifesting much in the last few years. MPAA rating, length, and genre ratings will be staying the same though the specific ratings per genre will be adjusted to be less harsh on some genres and more restrictive on others (war went up for example). Length factors were also changed a smidgen.
Release: While I’m not quite at a point of removing the festival factor altogether, I’ve decreased the number of festivals that will carry their own factors to Berlin, Cannes, Sundance, Telluride, Toronto, and Venice. Berlin is an edge case, as is Sundance, the other four are prominent enough to be significant for features released there, even if not an award winner. I’m also removing the Release Strategy rating as I don’t think it has any bearing on Oscar contention at this time.
Critics: This factor shall remain unchanged as I think it’s a pretty accurate reflection of a film’s chance, though it might end up overshadowing some of the other factors with a category factor that’s much higher. This is why a reduction in the number of films to receive a contender review will be necessitated by the aforementioned changes.
Audiences: This is also a useful factor for determining popularity. A film can be popular with audiences but not critics and some of those will carry over while the reverse is also true.
With that, I believe I’ve tackled all of the major changes and look forward to seeing how these alterations impact the series.
