Filed under: art, art institutions, economics, movies, Rejections | Tags: awards, Pay to Play, podcast, The Academy Awards, The Ambies, The Oscars
Well – I paid $175 to be considered for an Ambie award for The Dragoning (in the DIY category for low budget productions). The Ambies are the podcast awards that the entertainment business seem to take seriously. They’re discussed in publications like Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. Was it a smart investment to spend $175 to try and get nominated? If we’d gotten selected for the finals, it definitely would have been. But for a return of absolutely bupkiss, it feels like it’s not. It feels like a lot of money to lose just to lose.
But then there’s the Oscars. This is why I decided to apply and spend the $175, because of how the Oscars work. The average person imagines that the Oscars are chosen by groups of people getting together, evaluating all the movies and then nominating the best ones. I used to imagine that they watched all the movies that came out that year and awarded the ones the group liked best.
It doesn’t work like that, come to find out. The folks in the Academy don’t necessarily see all the movies, in fact, it’s rare that they do. To make sure your film is considered for the Oscars, or even seen by the right people, you have to do an Oscar campaign and Oscar campaigns are very expensive. If you’ve ever wondered why Actor A in a movie was nominated but their co-star Actor B was not, even though they did an equally amazing job, this is likely why. The studio or producers of this movie just don’t have the budget for both of them.
Why are Oscar campaigns so expensive? Because they are not just expensive advertising campaigns (billboards, magazine ads, commercials) but also elaborate marketing schemes. It’s packaging the DVDs that get sent to Academy voters. And while it is, apparently, against the rules to send gifts to members of the Academy, most campaigns send swag boxes or “promotional items” to journalists, who write or discuss the movies and generate the all important buzz.
An Oscar campaign (and this is often just to get nominated, by the way) can cost $15 million (average campaigns are between $3 and $10 million) and you are extremely unlikely to even be in the conversation without one.
Anyway – in the context of most people trying to get an Oscar, I sort of felt like – even though it doesn’t feel good to lose $175 just to lose, it might be necessary. There is no less mercenary way to get awards. Every single award system is like this. And if you GET one, it can change everything. Your movie gets nominated for an Oscar, you’re likely going to be able to seize some opportunities you could not have accessed before. An Ambie award would have changed everything for my podcast and theatre company. Because even though all awards are essentially a mercenary exercise, when you say “Award winning” or even “Nominated” in front of your work, a lot of people will suddenly start paying attention. If nothing else, the name of your podcast is put in front of a lot more people than it would be otherwise.
I paid $25 to nominate our show to a different (less prestigious than the Ambies) awarding body this year, even though I knew it was highly unlikely to win because I knew, for some people, seeing “Nominated” might be the thing to get them to finally listen to the show. For whatever reason, a lot of people need someone else’s stamp of approval before they’ll engage with a work of art.
This year’s Ambie nominees are apparently dominated by Audible (a subsidiary of Amazon, purchased for $300 million in 2008) so clearly money helps get you an Ambie, as well. I’ve been a listener to thirteen of the nominated shows and some of them really deserve those awards! I also notice that some of them are in multiple categories, so they likely spent a whole lot more money than I did in their award submission. If you’ve got Amazon money, or even Wondery money, you can submit in every category you might be eligible for.
Awards are almost always Pay to Play. The only way to have a shot at one, is to pay your money and hope you get lucky. I did not get lucky this time so it feels like a waste of money. But maybe what I need to do is figure out a way to get some swag boxes to some journalists.
*Wondering why I’m telling you about rejections? Read my initial post about this here and my patron’s idea about that here.
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