The Best Movie Ever | Oscar Bait

The significance of the Academy Awards in the motion picture industry is hard to track properly, but one thing is for sure, if it weren’t for the possibilities of prestigious awards there would probably be fewer serious historical dramas, message movies, and melodramas coming out just before the end of the year. Great films like Spotlight and Brooklyn don’t typically break box office records, so having an additional incentive to make them is probably a pretty good thing.

But then there are the films we call “Oscar bait.” While some serious films get green lit more easily because of the potential to win Academy Awards, Oscar bait movies seem to cater specifically to the Academy as a target demographic. They are designed to hit all the major bullet points that are “award-worthy,” whether or not they warrant actual awards. These Oscar bait films are typically historical dramas about real-life events (because that’s important), are socially conscious (but not TOO controversial), feature elaborate costumes and production design (to earn more below the line nominations), and give the actors big emotional moments (which look great in a clip show).

Also: 10 Oscar Snubs We Should All Stop Whining About

The danged thing is when you have a group of films that all meet a specific set of criteria, for better or worse you have a legitimate genre. So the question we put to our panel of film critics is, what’s the best Oscar bait movie ever? Let’s let Crave’s William Bibbiani and Witney Seibold, and Collider’s Brian Formo, present their picks for the pinnacle of Oscar bait cinema in this week’s Best Movie Ever. Come back next Wednesday for another all-new, highly debatable installment!

Brian Formo’s Pick: The Deer Hunter (1978)

Universal Pictures

When we think of Oscar Bait, we think of movies that were greenlit not for their commercial prospects, but for their perceived ability to get easy Oscar votes. This includes lots of biopics, topical films, and essentially every costumed period piece post-A Room with a View. Many of those have won awards. But for the best Oscar Bait film of all time I have to go with the film that changed how votes are courted. And that’s Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (consequently, its strategy is similar to the one done by The Revenant this year).

Cimino’s film was already bloated at three and a half hours and extremely over budget at $13 million. Universal execs hated it, thought it was un-American and wanted the wedding scene (which is almost a movie unto itself) reduced to a few shots. To prove their fears it was testing horribly with audiences (particularly at a disastrous screening in Detroit) for being too depressing and too long. But it had to be salvaged in some capacity (for today that budget would be $47 million). Universal pulled the film, and decided only to screen it in New York and Los Angeles at the end of the year, specifically for Oscar voters who they could follow up with, wine, dine and talk about the implications of the first big (and bloated) studio-funded Vietnam movie. And if they could get nominated, they could release the film wider as an Academy-stamped sweeping American epic.

That is what happened. After receiving a laundry list of nominations, The Deer Hunter began to expand cities, very slowly and hid itself from middle America, while touting itself as a tragic masterpiece with Oscar statues on the posters and advertisements. It didn’t even have a wide release until after it won Best Picture. And that release strategy of using Oscar nominations to market a film that hadn’t shown much of anywhere outside of America’s biggest cities (with the most Oscar voters) became commonplace. 

Witney Seibold’s Pick: The Reader (2008)

The Weinstein Company

There is a contradiction at work when it comes to Oscar Bait films. They are often poised to be awarded as the Best Movies of the Year, and yet they so rarely end up being of consequence. Every year, the world gets all aflutter about a certain pack of films, only to have them fade rapidly into the distance the very instant the Oscar telecast has come to an end. As mentioned above, Oscar Bait films only have to fulfill perfectly an allotted checklist of “hot button” tear-jerk topics, feature capable production values and have at least one notable performance. And that’s pretty much it. The list of approved Oscar Bait subjects is so short and so familiar; it has repeatedly been spoofed throughout the industry.

In one notable spoof – on an episode of Extras in 2005 – actress Kate Winslet declared that the best way to get an Oscar is to star in a film about World War II. This moment of cynical levity, however, proved to be true, as Winslet did indeed finally win an Oscar in 2008, and it was for a film about World War II. Stephen Daldry’s The Reader, largely already forgotten today, might be the best example of what Oscar Bait has come to mean in the modern world. It was nominated for Best Actress, Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Cinematography. It hit all the right bases, appealed to the right group of people, was hugely significant for about three months, and has since lost all that significance. 

Ample spoilers await: In The Reader, Winslet plays a nanny who once looked after children during World War II. A younger boy has an affair with her. She cannot read. She goes on trial. She murdered children. She was part of the Nazi party. She commits suicide. Everyone is sad, yet oddly edified. So it’s a WWII film, it’s about illiteracy, it’s about a steamy affair, it’s about a trial, and it’s about suicide. And it features one great performance. It’s hard to stave of cynicism when looking at a film like The Reader, and the filmmakers are certainly not cynical about the film’s subject matter. But given when it was released what it ultimately accomplished – not to mention how it looks and moves – The Reader is an Oscar voter’s dream. 

William Bibbiani’s Pick: The King’s Speech (2010)

The Weinstein Company

There are, it must be said, some excellent Oscar bait movies out there. But even the best of them are often undone by their genre trappings. When every creative decision made on a movie seems to have been made by the same sausage factory, the best you can usually get out of it is a mass-produced sausage.

Case in point: The King’s Speech, my pick for the ultimate Oscar bait picture. It’s an okay flick if we’re honest. Colin Firth gives a fine performance as King George VI, who must overcome a distracting stutter if he is ever going to lead his people in the newfangled era of radio. It is an intriguing idea for a story, but one that is probably better suited to a light comedy than a serious drama that somehow equates “overcoming all obstacles” with “an impossibly rich and powerful man finds the courage within himself to hire an expensive tutor.”

The King’s Speech won the Best Picture award, making it one of the most successful Oscar bait movies ever made, and like The Reader before it, Tom Hooper’s film has already been almost completely forgotten, except when people talk about Oscar bait. Here was a film so homogenous, so generically inspiring, so historically non-threatening, that the majority of the Academy voters were forced to say, “Yeah, it’s alright I guess.” They took the bait, and that means the bait works, doesn’t it?

Previously on The Best Movie Ever:

Top Photo: Universal Pictures / The Weinstein Company