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Oscar bait is a term used in the film community for movies that appear to have been produced for the sole purpose of earning nominations for Academy Awards or "Oscars", as they are commonly known. They are usually released just in advance of Oscar season, late in the calendar year, so as to meet the minimum eligibility requirements for the awards and be fresh in the minds of Oscar voters. The prestige or acclaim the studio may receive from the nomination or award is often secondary to the increased box office receipts such a film may garner; some films may even be depending on it to turn a profit. Films seen as Oscar bait often have distinct characteristics. Lavishly produced epic length period dramas, often set against tragic historical events such as the Holocaust, are frequently seen this way and often contend for the technical Oscars such as cinematography, makeup and hairstyling, costume design or production design. Alternatively, if set in the present, the plot may center around a character with a physical or mental disability. The cast may well include actors with previous awards or nominations, a trait that may also be shared by the director or writer. While the term has been used in discussions of films since at least 1948, and studios have always tended to release at least some films that seemed intended for Oscar voters near the end of the year, the explicit use of the Oscar nominations as a promotional strategy dates to 1978. That year, Michael Cimino's ''The Deer Hunter'' was shown only to limited audiences heavy with Oscar voters and critics for just long enough to be eligible, and then went into wide release after the nominations were announced. It ultimately won that year's Best Picture Oscar. In later years other studios emulated the strategy, and in the early 21st century the term has come into wide use among both filmmakers and viewers. Films termed "Oscar bait" are not always successful. Many films that seemed to critics to aspire to nominations, perhaps too blatantly, have instead received none at all. Audiences have in turn avoided those films in favor of those that did receive nominations. In a 2014 study of 3,000 films released since 1985, two UCLA professors identified the 1990 film ''Come See the Paradise'' as the most deliberately targeted for the Oscars. It did not receive any nominations and failed at the box office. ==History== From the first Oscars, there were instances of films whose initial, limited release at the end of a year was meant to qualify it for Academy consideration before a wider release. In 1933, MGM released the Greta Garbo classic ''Queen Christina'' in New York and Los Angeles the week after Christmas, expanding it to more cities once 1934 began. Six years later, it did the same with ''Gone with the Wind'', which went on to win the Best Picture Oscar. "Oscar bait" was used in a critical 1948 review of John Ford's ''Fort Apache'' in ''The New Republic'' that ends with the sentence "Postcards are supposed to be sent through the mail; flashed self-consciously on the screen, they look like Oscar bait." ''The New York Times'' used it in a 1955 article about the then-upcoming ''The Harder They Fall'', Humphrey Bogart's final film. A 1968 ad for ''The Lion in Winter'' quoted from a review in ''Cosmopolitan'' praising the performances of Peter O'Toole and Katharine Hepburn as "Oscar bait outings." These all referred to films or performances that, while they might attract the attention of Academy voters, were not explicitly made with them in mind. But also in 1948, the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in ''United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc.'', forbidding the studios from owning theater chains, changed the film industry profoundly. With their pictures no longer guaranteed to have an adequate theatrical run, and television beginning to offer competition, the studios had to rely increasingly on marketing to make films profitable. Thus their release patterns began following the calendar even more closely than they already had.〔 The first film to deliberately seek Oscar nominations as a marketing strategy was ''The Deer Hunter'' in 1978. After a disastrous preview screening of the lengthy Vietnam War epic in Detroit, Universal turned to another producer, Allan Carr, with both Broadway and Hollywood experience, for advice on how to successfully market a depressing film.〔 He realized that, with such a grim subject and brutal depictions of war and torture, the only way viewers would seek the film out was if it had been nominated for Academy Awards. Carr, once the producers had hired him as a consultant, arranged for two two-week screenings at a single theater in New York and Los Angeles before the year ended, the minimum requirements for Oscar eligibility at that time. The audiences were limited to critics and Academy members. After that Universal pulled the film from distribution〔 save for some showings on the Z Channel, a boutique cable network that catered to film enthusiasts with showings of rare, arty movies and exclusive director's cuts of more popular ones. "We will cultivate the right audience," Carr promised. "''The Deer Hunter'' is an Oscar winner!"〔 When the Oscar nominations were announced, ''The Deer Hunter'' received nine. It was immediately put into wide release with advertising and publicity materials drawing attention to the nominations. Ultimately it won five, including Best Picture. "It's a common pattern today," said Thom Mount, then president of Universal, years later. "But it was unheard of in 1978. Now everybody does it."〔 Critic Ty Burr agrees. "The practice is the equivalent of a triumphant slam dunk in the final seconds, and it often wins the game," he wrote in a 2013 ''New York Times Magazine'' article.〔 During the 1980s, as Hollywood moved away from director-driven films like ''The Deer Hunter'', focusing on repeating the success of summer blockbusters like ''Jaws'' and ''Star Wars'' (both of which had also been nominated for Best Picture), independent filmmakers refined Carr's methods of exploiting the Oscars. Merchant Ivory's lavish costume dramas, often based on novels by Henry James or E.M. Forster, were widely emulated and set the standard for one type of Oscar-bait production. Their 1985 adaptation of Forster's ''A Room with a View'' won two of the seven Oscars it was nominated for.〔 By 1991 the modern film-release calendar, in which studios released the movies they had the highest Oscar hopes for in autumn and December, was set. Independent-film mogul Harvey Weinstein sought prestige for his productions through Oscars; it culminated in a 1998 Best Picture for ''Shakespeare in Love'', another costume drama.〔 Similar strategies to ''The Deer Hunter'' brought Weinstein's company another Best Picture in 2010 for ''The King's Speech'', starring Colin Firth, who had gotten his start in Merchant Ivory's 1980s films.〔 Use of the term "Oscar bait" in the media began to increase in the mid-1990s to a 2004 peak, after which it has remained stable. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Oscar bait」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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