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Oscar Bait

800 statements
152 feature instances
121 referencing feature instances

Oscar Bait	type	FeatureClass
Oscar Bait	label	Oscar Bait
Oscar Bait	page	OscarBait
Oscar Bait	comment	It would be naÃ¯ve to think filmmakers always make movies according to whatever story they want to tell, and that a prestigious award like an Oscar, if they're lucky enough to be honored with one, is just icing on the cake. An Oscar is a big deal. It enhances the reputation of the actor, director, and studio and boosts future ticket sales for projects involving them. Since around the early 1980s, instead of expecting an Oscar to be a natural side-effect of a film being exceptionally good, studios and producers have often tried to engineer certain films specifically to attract Oscar nominations. Typically, the results are more serious, depressing, or "artistic" films. They're called Oscar Bait, and the practice is also derisively known as "Oscarbation". The trend started in the 1980s in the wake of the emergence of the Summer Blockbuster, and as New Hollywood ended. Before then, it was a pretty good bet that the most popular movies were also the best ones and thus the likely Oscar winners. But as directors like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas hit their stride, they made beloved and well-received movies which were nevertheless seen as too lightweight to win the "important" categories—acting, direction, writing, and picture—though they're more likely to clean up in the technical categories. At the same time, the "serious" fare that did win the artistic categories slowly became less popular. While into the mid-'90s it was common for at least one major, mainstream hit to make it to the highest categories when it came to Oscar nominations, and sometimes they even won (Rain Man and Forrest Gump were the highest-grossing films domestically in their respective years), there was a growing focus from studios on targeting younger audiences with simpler Summer Blockbusters that didn't deal with realistic concerns of people over the age of 30. With fewer and fewer opportunities for "serious" films to get made and widely released at all since the Turn of the Millennium, what ones are made tend to focus on going for the gold and making their studios at least look like they care about True Art. Such films are usually depressing dramas, Glurgey inspirational films, and examples of man's inhumanity to man â€“ an abnormally large proportion of Oscar Bait films have been set during The Holocaust. There's also a big focus on racism, mental illness, and Inspirationally Disadvantaged characters. It's rare for a comedy film to do well at the Oscars; in fact, one of the biggest clichÃ©s of this trope is a comedic actor starring in a heavy-handed drama in an attempt to be Taken Seriously. Sci-fi, fantasy, and horror don't do much better, and animated films were given their own categories once they flirted with pushing into the big leagues. These aren't hard and fast rules; you might see a Dramedy or Dark Comedy get major nominations, mostly because there's still room for suffering. The cost of all this is that most Oscar Bait movies don't do well at the box office. Hype Backlash and Hype Aversion play into that — the heavy campaigning to win an Oscar can be a big turn-off. Furthermore, many Oscar Bait films are released around December or January (as a direct lead-in to the Academy Awards show in late February), so it's easy to tell them apart from Summer Blockbusters. Perhaps because the Academy can actually tell the difference between a good, honest movie and an Oscar Bait attempt, and partly because sometimes they respect the general public's opinion of a movie and will try to reflect that, there are many movies that are obviously gunning for awards that don't get nominated at all much less win. (This can mean an Award Snub.) And no matter how genuinely good these kind of films can be, depressing films about people suffering through tragedy, alienation, physical and mental disability, and/or the horrors of the worst periods in human history don't often have the makings of a fun night out at the movies. This trope is far more common with the Oscars than the top honors in other media. With theatre, "Tony Bait" is less discernable because theatre naturally lends itself to melodrama, while the Emmys and Grammys have the brilliant idea to give awards based on genre. This allows, for example, a sitcom to be judged on its merits as a sitcom though a Very Special Episode is often blatantly gunning for an Emmy. The Award-Bait Song, by the way, is not the Grammy equivalent. That trope refers to the lead single from an Oscar Bait movie soundtrack that's just as thirsty for an Oscar as the movie itself, though they'll hardly complain if they snag a Grammy or four along the way. See also Death by Newbery Medal for the literary equivalent. Contrast It's Not Supposed to Win Oscars.
Oscar Bait	fetched	2024-03-12T07:45:33Z
Oscar Bait	parsed	2024-03-12T07:45:33Z
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Oscar Bait	isPartOf	DBTropes
Oscar Bait / int_140068f2	type	Oscar Bait
Oscar Bait / int_140068f2	comment	Courage Under Fire is a war drama directed by Edward Zwick, which revolves around an investigation conducted by a Lieutenant-Colonel (Denzel Washington) aimed at deciding whether a medical officer (Meg Ryan) killed in a battle in the Gulf War should receive posthumously the Medal of Honor. Inspired by Rashomon, the film shows several versions of what would have happened, all played by Ryan. Considered by many to be an "Oscar film" before its release, it ended up not getting any nominations.
Oscar Bait / int_140068f2	featureApplicability	1.0
Oscar Bait / int_140068f2	featureConfidence	1.0
Courage Under Fire	hasFeature	Oscar Bait / int_140068f2
Oscar Bait / int_147cc97f	type	Oscar Bait
Oscar Bait / int_147cc97f	comment	The film adaptation of Captain Corelli's Mandolin, directed by John Madden (of Shakespeare in Love) and starring Nicolas Cage, PenÃ©lope Cruz, John Hurt and Christian Bale, acquired a reputation as an Oscar bait long before it hit the screen. The theme, mixing romance and war (a forbidden love on a Greek island occupied by Axis troops during World War II) and the fact that it was a Miramax production contributed strongly to the label. The film received negative reviews and had no Oscar nominations.
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Oscar Bait / int_147cc97f	featureConfidence	1.0
Captain Corellis Mandolin	hasFeature	Oscar Bait / int_147cc97f
Oscar Bait / int_160b4833	type	Oscar Bait
Oscar Bait / int_160b4833	comment	Clone High: Season 2's "For Your Consideration" tries to sell itself as a heartbreaking award-worthy story from the get-go. It tells Mr. Butlertron's over-the-top tragic backstory (repeatedly referred to in-universe as "award-worthy"): he grew up in poverty (depicted in a Deliberately Monochrome style), left his family to become a prostitute, seemingly impregnated and married a client who then broke his heart, then lost his beloved (human) brother Wesley while out at sea. Along the way, it employs numerous Art Shifts, blatant religious and spiritual themes, and gratuitous artsy shots of beaches and sunsets. At the end of the episode, the clouds outright spell out "F.Y.C." to hammer it in.
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Oscar Bait / int_174feaf6	type	Oscar Bait
Oscar Bait / int_174feaf6	comment	The Shape of Water had one of the most oddball premises ever for an Oscar nominee (a love story between a mute woman and a fish person), which you might think would've alienated the Academy. Instead, it won Best Picture and Director.
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Oscar Bait / int_181720de	type	Oscar Bait
Oscar Bait / int_181720de	comment	The Artist won Best Picture in spite of it being a Silent Movie from 2011. It's not often that Le Film Artistique (or something vaguely resembling it anyway) gets nominations beyond Best Foreign Film, but this one won the whole thing. It helped that it was also an unashamed love letter to Old Hollywood, which probably appealed to Academy viewers.
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The Artist	hasFeature	Oscar Bait / int_181720de
Oscar Bait / int_1fed53cb	type	Oscar Bait
Oscar Bait / int_1fed53cb	comment	Late Night with Seth Meyers presents: Oscar Bait: Real Trailer, Fake Movie.
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Oscar Bait / int_1fed53cb	featureConfidence	1.0
Late Night	hasFeature	Oscar Bait / int_1fed53cb
Oscar Bait / int_203f09b9	type	Oscar Bait
Oscar Bait / int_203f09b9	comment	The Lovely Bones was based on a critically-acclaimed book about a murdered girl watching her family from the afterlife. It was directed by Oscar winner Peter Jackson and pushed to the end of the year into Oscar Bait time. The film received mediocre reviews, and the only nomination it got was for Stanley Tucci for Best Supporting Actor.
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Oscar Bait / int_213742cf	type	Oscar Bait
Oscar Bait / int_213742cf	comment	Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima are both set during World War II.
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Oscar Bait / int_225c51e0	type	Oscar Bait
Oscar Bait / int_225c51e0	comment	The Naked Gun 33 1/3 includes a scene at the Oscar ceremony, where all the films were ridiculously High Concept, like "the story of one woman's triumph over the death of her cat, set against the background of the Hindenburg disaster," and "the story of one woman's triumph over a yeast infection, set against the background of the tragic Buffalo Bills season of 1971."
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The Naked Gun	hasFeature	Oscar Bait / int_225c51e0
Oscar Bait / int_23633967	type	Oscar Bait
Oscar Bait / int_23633967	comment	Top Gun: Maverick was the long-awaited sequel to a film that, while a hit with audiences, was never a critical darling, and was a big-budget action Summer Blockbuster released in May. However, it ended up receiving critical acclaim and began to be regarded as one of 2022's best films, which would lead to it getting six Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and a surprise nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay, and eventually won for Best Sound.
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Oscar Bait / int_24ffd341	type	Oscar Bait
Oscar Bait / int_24ffd341	comment	It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia has â€œThe Gang Tries Desperately to Win an Awardâ€�. Itâ€™s nominally about the gang trying to win a Best Bar award, but is actually a Leaning on the Fourth Wall commentary on the fact the show has failed to garner any recognition from the Emmys by having the bars stand in for shows. The gang is going up against a bar straight out of Cheers (with a Token Minority manager for good measure) where the owners make generic and inoffensive jokes, complete with a Laugh Track. The gang tries to model Paddyâ€™s Pub after the bar that wins, such as by making sure they don't have too many black guys present so the judges won't think its a "black bar" and trying to create some Will They or Won't They? tension between Mac and Dee. Charlie even decides to write a song for the bar to help them win. Ultimately, as with everything they try, they fail spectacularly.
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Oscar Bait / int_2566ca3d	type	Oscar Bait
Oscar Bait / int_2566ca3d	comment	No Country for Old Men followed up on The Departed and won Best Picture the very next year with the same formula. This, though, was a relentlessly cynical film which won very big — rather than most Oscar Bait, it presents humanity's failure as inevitable and comments on the meaninglessness of the material world. It was also kind of an upset winner over There Will Be Blood — an even bleaker film.
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Oscar Bait / int_261c8d3f	type	Oscar Bait
Oscar Bait / int_261c8d3f	comment	The Simpsons: Burt Reynolds describes his new film Fireball and Mudflap: An entry form for Best Documentary is shown to ask entrants to declare if they are â€œHolocaust-relatedâ€� or "Non-Holocaust-relatedâ€�. When Marge Simpson attends the Sundance film festival, she discovers that all the films on display are extremely depressing (including themes like underprivileged transvestites, underprivileged hippies, and Chernobyl) and most of them have ironically upbeat titles.
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Oscar Bait / int_2731ae3b	type	Oscar Bait
Oscar Bait / int_2731ae3b	comment	Johnny Belinda is Based on a True Story of a deaf-mute girl who gets raped, has her rapistâ€™s baby, gets declared "unfit" to raise the baby and has to fight to keep it, and is put on trial for her rapist's murder — all while struggling to pay the bills on the family farm. Jane Wyman won Best Actress for playing her.
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Oscar Bait / int_27a2d64a	type	Oscar Bait
Oscar Bait / int_27a2d64a	comment	In Extras, Kate Winsletâ€™s character plays in a Holocaust movie in an open bid to win an Oscar. Then in 2008, Winslet did it in real life in The Reader. This did not go unnoticed.
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Oscar Bait / int_28724fb2	type	Oscar Bait
Oscar Bait / int_28724fb2	comment	Titanic was unusual in that it wasn't meant to be Oscar Bait — just James Cameron's dream project that was supposed to be committed to the screen, and was originally being positioned as a Summer Blockbuster. People latched onto it, and it won almost everything. It does, however, tick a few of the boxes: it's a Period Piece centered around a famous historical event, yet still has a decade-spanning story thanks to said Period Piece story being told by a character in the present, and Forbidden Love between people of different socio-economic classes. Critics who appreciated Cameron's dedication to dutifully recreating many of the details of the Titanic and its sinking, but didn't care for the fictional love story, accused the director of shoehorning it in to increase his chances during awards season instead of letting the true story of the Titanic stand on its own.
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Oscar Bait / int_2941420	type	Oscar Bait
Oscar Bait / int_2941420	comment	HÃ¦vnen (Danish for "revenge", but released internationally as In a Better World) had everything: a failing marriage, vicious school bullies and attacks, Troubling Unchildlike Behavior, dead parents, and a doctor in an African refugee camp terrorised by a man who cuts pregnant women open. It won Best Foreign Film at the Oscars.
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Oscar Bait / int_296b64f6	type	Oscar Bait
Oscar Bait / int_296b64f6	comment	The first fifteen minutes of In & Out are rife with references to this trope. Matt Dillonâ€™s character wins an Oscar for playing a gay soldier unfairly discharged from the military, in a film that appears to be equal parts A Few Good Men, Philadelphia, and Forrest Gump. The actors he beat: â€œPaul Newman for Coot, Clint Eastwood for Codger, Michael Douglas for Primary Urges, and Steven Seagal for Snowball in Hell.â€�
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Oscar Bait / int_2a9edae	type	Oscar Bait
Oscar Bait / int_2a9edae	comment	A The Kids in the Hall sketch shows the best actor nomination at an Oscar show. Three of the actors played Inspirationally Disadvantaged (ranging from being deaf to having a spike in their head); their characters give the exact same Rousing Speech with appropriate music. The fourth clip is of a guy playing Hamlet. They award the Oscar to â€œeveryone but the Hamlet guy!â€�
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Oscar Bait / int_2abd5315	type	Oscar Bait
Oscar Bait / int_2abd5315	comment	Whose Line Is It Anyway? had a sketch where Ryan Stiles has to report the weather as if it were a scene from an Oscar-winning film. He did so by ribbing host Drew Carey and referencing â€œA Very Special Drewâ€�.
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Oscar Bait / int_2ba48a26	type	Oscar Bait
Oscar Bait / int_2ba48a26	comment	Castle had a suspect who was an actor, who says heâ€™s playing Matt Damonâ€™s â€œhalf-wit fatherâ€� because â€œitâ€™s got nominations written all over it.â€�
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Oscar Bait / int_2e1df124	type	Oscar Bait
Oscar Bait / int_2e1df124	comment	Wreck-It Ralph deserves special mention purely for the fact that it's a video game movie, in an industry not well known for producing quality video game movies. Beyond that, it's about a video game bad guy who wants to prove he can actually be good. No Oscar (it lost to the more Oscar-baity Brave), but several other awards and nominations anyway, including the Best Animated Feature Annie Award over Brave.
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Oscar Bait / int_309df9ea	comment	In the third segment of Linkaraâ€™s History of Power Rangers series, he shows a clip of Bulk and Skull trying to save a bunch of kids from drowning in a lake. They run down the pier in slow motion with inspirational music. Linkara responds by putting "Oscar Clip" at the bottom of the screen. (And it turns out the lake was knee-deep and the children were just playing.)
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Oscar Bait / int_31677f1c	type	Oscar Bait
Oscar Bait / int_31677f1c	comment	He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (1983): Animator Tom Tataranowicz, who came up with the idea for the Unexpectedly Dark Episode "The Problem With Power", openly admitted in the DVD commentary that he did so to enforce this trope, as episodes in which someone died always won Emmys. It didn't work, though the episode is considered to be one of the very best of the show.
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Oscar Bait / int_3378b265	comment	Welcome to Marwen was a drama loosely based on a true story, about an artist who suffers brain damage and mental trauma, resulting from physical aggression motivated by hatred, and who builds an imaginary world set in World War II Europe. Even before its release, it generated strong speculation about a Best Actor Oscar nomination for Steve Carell. Still, the film was released just ten days before the nominations closed on December 31, 2018. Unfortunately, it ended up being a box office failure and was critically panned, and the Academy didn't take the bait.
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Oscar Bait / int_34834a5c	comment	Kickassia has this in every scene regarding Spoonyâ€™s attempts to avoid â€œgiving in to the madnessâ€� (i.e. his Enemy Within Dr. Insano). He even engages in Ham-to-Ham Combat with it.
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Oscar Bait / int_34e5ea29	comment	Mr. Show did a sketch about â€œThe Dewey Awardsâ€�, which were specifically given to actors who played mentally disabled characters. One winner is a film called The Bob Lamonta Story, about a man who struggles with his own mentally challenged parents (only for Lamonta himself to show up and claim it was all Based on a Great Big Lie).
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Oscar Bait / int_3517767b	comment	Hawking, a biopic of famously disabled genius astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, was saturated with topics designed to warrant nominations from the BAFTA â€“ and not just about Hawking struggling with his ALS or his efforts in science. It even managed to include a few Holocaust references; a supporting character had to flee Nazi Germany with his family as a child.
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Oscar Bait / int_37b7acdb	comment	At the end of Road to Morocco, Bob Hope's character has accidentally blown up the ship, leaving the main cast stranded on a raft. Hope chews up the scenery, acting as if they've been stranded there for weeks. Then the camera pans up to reveal the New York City skyline. Bing Crosbyâ€™s character tells him to calm down, to which Hope bitterly remarks that theyâ€™ve ruined his chance for an Academy Award.
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Oscar Bait / int_37f2459b	comment	My Sister's Keeper checks several boxes: terminal illness, family conflict culminating in legal dispute. Cameron Diaz was criticized for not accepting to shave her hair for the role, preferring to wear a bald cap. The film did not receive any Oscar nominations, but was awarded at the Teen Choice Awards (Choice Summer Movie Drama), the ALMA Awards (Outstanding Actress in Motion Picture, or Diaz) and the Young Artist Awards (Best Performance in a Feature Film â€“ Leading Young Actress, for Abigail Breslin, and Best Performance in a Feature Film â€“ Supporting Actress, for Sofia Vassilieva).
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Oscar Bait / int_3953baf0	comment	The Hunchback of Notre Dame is Darker and Edgier than the typical Disney movie, adapting a historical classic and tackling themes like religious bigotry and justice for the oppressed. The songs were also written to be more operatic, in the vein of The Phantom of the Opera and Les MisÃ©rables.
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Oscar Bait / int_3ac755dd	type	Oscar Bait
Oscar Bait / int_3ac755dd	comment	Beauty and the Beast, against all odds, found its way out of the Animation Age Ghetto and wound up being nominated for Best Picture in 1991. It didn't win, but this in itself was an incredible feat (which Disney would futilely try to replicate). It remains the only animated feature to ever get nominated from when the field was five movies (Toy Story 3 and Up got nods after the field was expanded to 8-10 movies).
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Oscar Bait / int_3cd90f30	comment	In season 4 of Arrested Development, Rebel Alley (Isla Fisher) discusses the possibility of playing Michaelâ€™s deceased wife in a movie. After learning that said wife died of a terminal illness, Rebel says that all she needs now is to have her be mentally-challenged as well, and she'll be guaranteed an Oscar for her performance.
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Oscar Bait / int_406ca789	comment	Snow Falling on Cedars is a 1999 American legal drama film directed by Scott Hicks, and starring Ethan Hawke, James Cromwell, Max von Sydow, Youki Kudoh, Rick Yune, Richard Jenkins, James Rebhorn, and Sam Shepard, based on David Guterson's PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novel of the same name, with a screenplay by Hicks and Ronald Bass (who won an Academy Award for writing the screenplay for Barry Levinson's Rain Man and who is associated with films are regularly nominated for multiple motion picture awards). The movie tells the story, set in the 50s, of a trial of a Japanese-American accused of murdering a white man. It ended up getting nominated solely for Best Cinematography.
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Oscar Bait / int_426a7572	comment	Animaniacs: One short was an Anvilicious spoof of not just Oscar Bait, but also the animated awards the show could actually compete with. It started with saving a beached whale and went on from there. They didnâ€™t win, and everything went to Hell after that. In a Thanksgiving episode, Miles Standing is out hunting turkeys, while the Warners play Native Americans raised by turkeys. While Dot waxes eloquent over their hardship, the caption â€œACADEMY MEMBERS VOTE NOW!â€� flashes on the screen. During their "Jokahontas" sketch, a Take That! against Disney movies, the song "Same Old Heroine" has this line:
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Oscar Bait / int_439a65b3	comment	Doubt started as total Tony Bait and moved into Oscar Bait with its film adaptation. It's about the Catholic altar-boy pedophile abuse scandal, which was Ripped from the Headlines. The young victim is also the first black student in an otherwise white school, who may or may not be gay as well (and his father is not happy). It won multiple Tonys, including Best Play and Best Actress. The film version stars Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, and Meryl Streep — an Oscar-winning machine if there ever was one.
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Oscar Bait / int_4551706c	comment	Rain Man gets a lot of credit for kicking off the modern trend. The film won Best Picture, Best Direction, and Best Original Screenplay in 1988, and Dustin Hoffman won Best Actor for his portrayal of the autistic savant Deuteragonist (the protagonist is played by Tom Cruise). It was also a huge box-office hit, unlike some of the films that followed it.
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Oscar Bait / int_4617a9f2	comment	Married... with Children had at least one episode that ended with a heartwarming scene and the subtitle: â€œFor your Emmy considerations.â€�
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Oscar Bait / int_48ed41c8	comment	Pocahontas had begun pre-production and was planned to be a mostly historically accurate retelling of Pocahontas meeting John Smith - with Pocahontas actually being twelve as she was in real life, speaking Powhatan for the majority of the film and learning English the normal way. Then-head of Walt Disney Studios Jeffrey Katzenberg had the filmmakers turn it into a tale of Star-Crossed Lovers, muting all the talking animal characters to make the story more serious and tackling themes about xenophobia and racism. It received a tepid response from both critics and audiences, and the only Oscars it ended up getting were for its music.
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Oscar Bait / int_4b48b6a0	comment	Changeling was a 1920s-era Period Piece conspiracy film about a missing child, which starred Oscar-baity actress Angelina Jolie.
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Oscar Bait / int_4ce81a12	comment	Jakob the Liar is a Dramedy directed by Peter Kassovitz and starring Robin Williams, based on a book of the same name written by Jurek Becker and published in East Germany, whose story is set in a Polish ghetto in 1944, where a shopkeeper tries to preserve the hopes of the inhabitants by claiming who hears on a clandestine radio set news about the advances of Allied troops. The film received unfavorable comparisons to Life Is Beautiful, and Williams was even nominated for Golden Rasperry Award for his performance as Jakob.
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Oscar Bait / int_4d308d5c	comment	Mommie Dearest is a biopic based on Joan Crawford (herself an Oscar winner) and her abusive relationship with her adopted daughter — it's even based on the daughter's autobiography. The film was meant to be total Oscar Bait, and Faye Dunaway was convinced that she would win an Oscar for playing Crawford. But she botched it, Chewing the Scenery so hard that it made the film a veritable Narm fountain. The studio even resorted to a Parody Retcon to try and claim that it was a campy comedy. The film saw the decline of Dunaway's career as an A-list star.
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Oscar Bait / int_4e080220	comment	It was particularly prominent in the Best Documentary Feature category from 1995 to 2000: three of the five winners directly involved the Holocaust (Anne Frank Remembered, The Last Days, and Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport) â€“ and another winner, The Long Way Home, was about post-WWII Jewish refugees. See also the 1981 winner, Genocide.
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Oscar Bait / int_4f7b790	comment	Eternals is viewed as the rare attempt to make Oscar bait out of a blockbuster superhero film. For its director, Marvel Studios signed on ChloÃ© Zhao, whose prior experience was in low-budget films with novice actors and who even won Best Director for Nomadland. The resulting film was an eclectic product, with long stretches of philosophical discussion about the nature of humanity, war and genocide, the ethics of free will and utilitarianism, and stunning vistas shot on location and with natural light amidst sudden massive CGI superhuman battles. Ultimately, it received underwhelming reviews and wasn't nominated at any major awards shows. To date, Marvel Studios' only Best Picture nomination has been for Black Panther, which was a smash hit with both audiences and critics despite Marvel having so little faith in it they rushed it out for Black History Month 2018 with underbaked VFX.
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Oscar Bait / int_52229148	comment	Holocaust-themed foreign language films that have won the Foreign Language award include The Shop on Main Street, the aforementioned Life Is Beautiful, The Counterfeiters, and Son of Saul. There's also Nowhere in Africa, about a Jewish couple that fled to Africa before the war started, but have family members back in Germany that fall victim to the Holocaust, and Ida, about a Polish novitiate nun finds out that she's actually Jewish and that her parents were betrayed and murdered when she was an infant.
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Oscar Bait / int_549a2e89	comment	In Yu-Gi-Oh!: Bonds Beyond Time Abridged:
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Oscar Bait / int_54d05bc0	comment	CODA had the disability angle going for it, with a mostly deaf cast, but as a remake of a French film that wasn't particularly known or loved outside France, by a writer-director only making her second feature film, it got lost in the shuffle during awards season and only netted three Oscar nominations. But then it built up tremendous buzz during the Oscar campaign and ended up winning all three nominations: Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor (Troy Kotsur) and Best Adapted Screenplay.
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Oscar Bait / int_58af2679	comment	The Silence of the Lambs is dark, deals with mental illness, and addresses man's inhumanity to man. It's also a horror film, a genre that usually gets no love at the Oscars. (The producers were aware of that and billed it as a "Psychological Thriller".) It was the first horror film to win any of the "Big Five" since Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in 1932 and was only the third film of any kind to sweep all of the Big Five categories.
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Oscar Bait / int_5a184804	comment	Short films about the Holocaust that have won the Short Film prize include Visas and Virtue and Toyland.
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Oscar Bait / int_5ada53ed	comment	In a James Bond spoof, Roger played the role of Tearjerker, a villain whose Evil Plan is to make a film thatâ€™s such a tearjerker, it will kill anyone who watches it. That film, Oscar Gold, is a black-and-white Holocaust drama about a mentally challenged alcoholic Jewish boy whose puppy dies of cancer while he's hiding from the Nazis in an attic like Anne Frank. When the plan fails, Tearjerker tries to go even sadder — six hours of a baby chimpanzee trying to revive its dead mother.
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Oscar Bait / int_5db577ba	comment	The Dark Knight was the first comic book movie to win an acting nomination (for Heath Ledger) and only the fifth film based on a comic strip, comic book or graphic novel to earn an acting nomination.note The others, for those keeping score at home, were the aforementioned Jackie Cooper for Skippy, Al Pacino for Dick Tracy, Paul Newman for Road to Perdition, and William Hurt for A History of Violence. With the pervasiveness of serious Oscar Bait fare, the idea that friggin' Batman can win an Oscar was unreal. Then again, Ledger may have had the advantage of sadly being dead.
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Oscar Bait / int_5e9a5107	comment	Parasite is an interesting case. While it was a South Korean film (let alone the country's first showing for even the now-renamed Best International Film category) against established directors with credbility like Martin Scorsese, Sam Mendes and Quentin Tarantino and ostensible lockins like Joker, it also dealt with Capitalism Is Bad and Eat the Rich themes that made it popular with critics and audiences alike, even netting it a Palme d'Or win (notably one of the few unanimous wins of that prize). Still, the supposed odds against it had many people predicting wins for the aforementioned directors and their films, which wasn't helped by Director Bong Joon-ho making aÂ critical comments toward the Academy by comparing them to "local film festivals" for having a bias towards recognizing "safe" movies, Â which is why it shocked everyone by setting historical wins by: Being not just the first South Korean film but the first foreign language film note while 2011 winner The Artist was a French production, it was also a silent film with the sole dialogue being in English to win Best Picture. Having Bong also win for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay. Making Bong the second person in Oscar history to win four Oscars (together with an aforementioned International Film win, the only category it was considered a lock for caveat though technically he is not a named recepient in the Best International Feature (it is ascribed to the country of origin)) in one night, a distinction only shared by Walt Disney. More impressively, Disney's four wins for four different films, all of Bong's wins were for just this one. Speaking of the Palme d'Or, it was also just the third film in history to win both it and the Best Picture Oscar, this last happening back in 1956 with Marty.
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Oscar Bait / int_5e9ea81e	comment	Black Panther, the eighteenth film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, is a solo film about one of the most popular black superheroes. At first glance, it still feels like your typical superhero movie and the plot is about the hero inheriting the throne of his kingdom only to be challenged by an adversary who wants to lead a global revolution, which is not a common topic for an Oscar Bait. But Black Panther had an edge over the other solo superhero movies because the film touches on social and political issues that have significant cultural importance to the African and African-American communities. It earned many accolades and became the first superhero film to be nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars. And like Get Out, it was even released during the dump month of February.
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Oscar Bait / int_609c8e01	comment	Phenomenon is a dramatic fantasy film directed by Jon Turtletaub and starring John Travolta, about an ordinary man who, for reasons that remain mysterious until near the end of the film, acquires unusual intelligence and telekinetic powers. The film garnered some controversy from critics who saw it as alleged propaganda for the Church of Scientology (of which John Travolta is a longtime follower), but Travolta's performance was widely praised and considered by some to be Oscar-worthy. Ultimately, he ended up not being nominated for an Oscar for the film.
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Oscar Bait / int_60f02ddb	comment	American Dad!: Greg and Terry decide to film Stan as he searches for Oliver North's gold in "Stanny Slickers 2: The Legend of Ollie's Gold": In a James Bond spoof, Roger played the role of Tearjerker, a villain whose Evil Plan is to make a film thatâ€™s such a tearjerker, it will kill anyone who watches it. That film, Oscar Gold, is a black-and-white Holocaust drama about a mentally challenged alcoholic Jewish boy whose puppy dies of cancer while he's hiding from the Nazis in an attic like Anne Frank. When the plan fails, Tearjerker tries to go even sadder — six hours of a baby chimpanzee trying to revive its dead mother.
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Oscar Bait / int_6276800c	comment	The Nostalgia Critic gives a fierce Take That! to Selma, The Blind Side, 12 Years a Slave, and Django Unchained when Malcom refers to them as "White Guilt Oscar Bait movies" and points out the only reason he likes them is because The Critic always takes him out to dinner after they watch one.
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Oscar Bait / int_62cafa4	comment	Mad Max: Fury Road is one of the least Oscar-friendly movies ever made. It's the fourth film in a franchise that never saw any Oscar attention before, and had its last installment all the way back in 1985. It's a loud, explosive, and unapologetic pure action movie. It has very little dialogue and is essentially a nonstop two-hour car chase scene. And it was released all the way back in May. But it got critical acclaim for its action sequences, Show, Don't Tell storytelling, and hidden themes and was regarded as one of the best movies of 2015, topping more official Top 10 lists than any other. It ended up being an unexpected Oscar contender, being nominated for ten awards (including Best Picture) and winning six, the most of that year.
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Oscar Bait / int_681d35fe	comment	House of Gucci: Lady Gaga seemed to be wanting to build on the momentum of her nomination at Best Actress for A Star is Born, and Jared Leto is downright unrecognizable as Paolo Gucci, possibly seeking Best Supporting Actor. Not only were they both snubbed at the Oscars, Leto actually won a Razzie for Worst Supporting Actor.
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Oscar Bait / int_694ab80	type	Oscar Bait
Oscar Bait / int_694ab80	comment	Batman Beyond is an odd case of Emmy Bait. The show won an Emmy for the episode "The Eggbaby", which is a comedic slapstick romp that is light-hearted in tone and feels very out of place with the rest of the series. And yet, it won, even though superhero cartoons lived in the sewer of the animation ghetto.note The producers did this deliberately
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Oscar Bait / int_6a12c526	comment	The Other Two: The play 8 Gay Men With AIDS: A Poem in Many Hours is a multi-night, overly pretentious, badly-paced Tragic AIDS Story that nobody wants to criticize or walk out on for fear of offending the LGBT and HIV+ communities. It is quickly nominated for at least one Tony, to Cary's shock. Cary, deciding he wantes a similar level of acclaim, demands an Oscar from his team. His agent quickly gets acclaimed director Kelly Reichardt and buzzy star Harry Styles attached to a gay film that everyone is confident will keep Cary in the Oscar conversation. He realizes, however, that the industry is turning him into a bad person and decides to take a break from acting rather than do the film.
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Oscar Bait / int_6a2ca95a	comment	Young @ Heart was not eligible for either an Oscar or an Emmy (for various reasons), so it set its sights on international film festivals, particularly the Rose d'Or. It's a documentary about a pensioners' choir going on tour, and it hit so many of the Oscar Bait buttons that it's a surprise that it didn't fall victim to Hype Backlash. It won almost everything it ran for (only Man on Wire could beat it in anything).
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Oscar Bait / int_6c5f1ec4	comment	On Midnight Screenings, Brad Jones says he thinks calling a film Oscar Bait is an overused criticism. But he says he thinks it fits at least the trailer for the film of The Book Thief.
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Oscar Bait / int_6cdac96	comment	Get On Up stars Chadwick Boseman as James Brown, in a musical biopic about the musician's complicated life and career. It bombed at the Oscars, though observers felt that at least Boseman's performance should have gotten him a Best Actor nomination. The same could be argued for another one of Boseman's movies, Marshall, about the career of Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, the only Oscar nod it got being Best Original Song. Both movies bombed financially as well, Get on Up barely making its budget and Marshall not making its budget.
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Oscar Bait / int_6e859048	comment	Big Hero 6, which won in 2015, heavily touches on death and revenge, two very common Oscar Bait themes... and it's still a superhero movie where one of the main characters is a huggable robot. It ended up the first Marvel-related movie to win any major non-technical category.
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Oscar Bait / int_6ebddcd9	comment	12 Years a Slave, a visceral depiction of a man tricked into slavery in the South and the abuses he faced there, was also prime Oscar Bait material. It won Best Picture in 2014 (although it lost many others to Gravity). This was seen as so inevitable that Ellen DeGeneres addressed this at the start of the ceremony:
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Oscar Bait / int_6eed44ab	comment	Dead Ringers: The cast of Time lay things out to Sean Bean that the show must be as bleak and miserable as humanly possible so that they can get "wall to wall BAFTAs". When he breaks one of the rules, keeping any monologue to under two minutes, the rest of the cast come back to beat him senseless. Funnily enough, Time did in fact go on to win two BAFTAs...
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Oscar Bait / int_7149a731	comment	Although it is a movie about a comic book superhero, Wonder Woman generated significant expectation in the press that, given its female empowerment message, its epic tone and its massive public and critical success, it would benefit from a great Warner Bros.' campaign for Oscars and receive several nominations, including Best Picture, Best Actress for Gal Gadot and Best Director for Patty Jenkins. However, the film ended up receiving one of the biggest snubs in Oscar history, not even receiving nominations in the technical categories, which generated a notable wave of internet outrage.
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Oscar Bait / int_75584731	comment	In Tropic Thunder: One of the fake trailers at the beginning of the movie shows Kirk Lazarus and Tobey Maguire playing Irish monks who fall in love with each other in a clearly Oscar-baity film, Satan's Alley. Action star Tugg Speedman reflects on the failure of his Oscar Bait film Simple Jack, in which he plays a mentally-challenged farmhand. It was a total Box Office Bomb and called one of the worst films of all time. Kirk Lazarus explains that it's because people who won for playing Inspirationally Disadvantaged characters never went "full retardâ€�: Lazarus has a lot of experience with these, as he himself is a spoof of Oscar Bait actors. He's a five-time Oscar winner, and that's before Satan's Alley. He mentions having played Neil Armstrong, ticking the "based on a true story" box. His third Oscar was for a Chinese film called Land of Silk and Money, which he prepped for by working eight months in a textile factory. According to supplemental material, one of his five Oscars is for Best Actress, having apparently tackled a Cross-Cast Role, going to extremes with the usual Oscar-worthy physical transformations. In the movie itself, he's attempting that again, having undergone "pigmentation alteration" surgery to play a black man, a move which has generated more in-universe controversy than Oscar buzz. He never breaks character, despite realizing very early on in the film that production is ruined. As the icing on the cake, Robert Downey Jr. actually received an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Lazarus. Want even more icing on the cake? Along with Colin Farrell and Russell Crowe, one of the inspirations for Lazarus is Daniel Day Lewis, an actor who is to Oscar Bait films what Sylvester Stallone is to action films and Julia Roberts is to chick flicks. At the end of the film, the Oscar for Best Actor is presented. The stills of the nominees include Tom Hanks winning a race in a wheelchair and a blind Sean Penn learning braille.
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Oscar Bait / int_79416f79	comment	In Bowfinger, black action star Kit Ramsey (Eddie Murphy) weighs in on the trope:
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Oscar Bait / int_7a8aa955	comment	When Nine began production by the infamous Harvey Weinstein, there was strong anticipation that this adaptation of a hit Broadway musical, with an all-star cast that included several Oscar winners and nominees (Daniel Day-Lewis, Sophia Loren , Nicole Kidman, PenÃ©lope Cruz, Kate Hudson), directed by fellow Oscar nominee Rob Marshall, would not only be a huge critical and box office success, but also receive a large number of Oscar nominations. However, the film turned out to be a huge failure with audiences and critics, and it only received Oscar nominations in the categories for Best Supporting Actress (Penelope Cruz), Best Art Direction, Best Costume Design and Best Original Song, winning none of those awards.
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Oscar Bait / int_7b4f72fd	comment	Dreamgirls was designed to be Oscar Bait, and it got nominated for eight awards (including three for Movie Bonus Songs) — but failed to get nominations for Best Picture, Actor, Actress, or Director. On the big night, it was shut out in many of the categories it was nominated in. It's often speculated that Eddie Murphy would have won for Best Supporting Actor, were it not for the poor timing of Norbit coming out two weeks before that year's Oscars; the film was a major Creator Killer for him. Just as astonishingly, it didn't win Best Original Song either (although having three nommed songs might have split the vote). In the end, the only Oscars Dreamgirls won were for Best Supporting Actress and Best Sound Mixing.
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Oscar Bait / int_81330ae2	comment	War Horse, a 2011 film by Steven Spielberg, was widely accused of being Oscar Bait — even on the sole basis of its bombastic, overwrought trailer, which resulted in massive Hype Backlash.
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Oscar Bait / int_832f6cef	comment	The French Connection, the 1971 Best Picture winner, is a gritty and suspenseful genre film with a nihilistic tone. But unlike most Oscar winners, it has a morally ambiguous protagonist and an ending where The Bad Guy Wins and most of the other villains receive a Karma Houdini. Some speculate that the Academy gave the win to a film this dark to distance itself from the saccharine musicals that won in The '60s.
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Oscar Bait / int_8395dee1	comment	Invictus had Morgan Freeman playing Nelson Mandela, trying to unite South Africa after The Apartheid Era with the power of rugby.
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Oscar Bait / int_84c95dcd	comment	Defiance is a particularly shameless Oscar grab. It's Based on a True Story and follows a community of Belarussian Jews hiding in the forest from the Nazis and has a brooding Anti-Hero who is forced into cruel, angsty moral dilemmas. It took a page from Schindler's List and ended with a Photo Montage of the real-life survivors and their descendants as a "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue. But this one bombed at the Oscars, only getting nominated for its score. Between this and the backlash against The Reader, the trend of Holocaust-set films doing well on the awards circuit might have run its course.
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Oscar Bait / int_87ade389	type	Oscar Bait
Oscar Bait / int_87ade389	comment	J. Edgar was a Biopic of famous FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, as played by Leonardo DiCaprio in one of his many unsuccessful bids at an Oscar.
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Oscar Bait / int_882f1fdb	comment	Bugs Bunny has been known to occasionally shill for Oscars with overwrought â€œdramaticâ€� performances: In The Wabbit Who Came to Supper, Bugs pleads with Elmer Fudd to let him into his house, complaining in a very dramatic fashion about the cold. He suddenly perks up and says, â€œHey, this scene oughta get me the Academy Award!â€� Then he finishes â€œdyingâ€�, complete with mournful violins. In What's Cookinâ€™, Doc?, heâ€™s so enamored with his â€œactingâ€� that he crashes the ceremony to demand his Best Actor award.
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Oscar Bait / int_8b6a736	comment	Live-action shorts about disabilities that have won the Oscar include I'll Find a Way (spina bifida), Board and Care (Down syndrome), Stutterer, and The Silent Child (deafness).
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Oscar Bait / int_8b7b9cd5	comment	Star Wars broke out of the Sci Fi Ghetto and got Oscar nominations for Best Director (George Lucas), Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor (Alec Guinness), and Best Screenplay. It didn't win any of them, but it showed that a hugely popular sci-fi film might catch the Academyâ€™s attention. It opened the door for such films as E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Avatar, Aliens, and District 9 to get nominations as well, and non-sci-fi films in the same vein (like Raiders of the Lost Ark). That said, the fact that they didnâ€™t win anything big pointed towards Oscar Bait becoming an end in and of itself in years to follow.
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Oscar Bait / int_8cea2648	comment	Four years later, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse repeated the trick, having themes of loss and redemption, though its main achievement is its artstyle. It earned Sony Pictures Animation an Oscar among many other accolades.
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Oscar Bait / int_923dd091	comment	CollegeHumor made a video on this topic titled 21 Steps to Making an Oscar Movie, including: high-contrast low-saturation lighting, suspenseful piano music, period clothing, disability, drug addiction, low camera angle, suicide, and a lot of other clichÃ©s.
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Oscar Bait / int_92874b21	comment	The Book of Henry is a drama/thriller about a boy genius who devises an intricate plan to save a girl who is being abused by her stepfather. The film, in addition to addressing themes such as child abuse, terminal illness, grief, features an extraordinarily intelligent protagonist (such as Good Will Hunting, A Beautiful Mind, The Imitation Game), and a female protagonist who works as a waitress (such as Helen Hunt in As Good as It Gets and Hilary Swank in Million Dollar Baby). Treated as an event film and surrounded by expectations before its release, the film received very negative reviews due to the contrived coincidences and inconsistencies in its script, performed poorly at the box office and had no Oscar nominations.
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Oscar Bait / int_92916f5a	comment	Shrek was a subversive, Toilet Humor-involving Fractured Fairy Tale released when most animated movies were Strictly Formula. It was warmly received by critics and not only did it win the inaugural Best Animated Feature Oscar, but it also managed to be nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay.
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Oscar Bait / int_965783f1	comment	Dear Evan Hansen came from the same studios as Cats and is not only based on a popular and well-liked Tony-winning musical, but has an established producer in Marc Platt (La La Land, Bridge of Spies, The Trial of the Chicago 7), stars his son Ben Platt reprising his Tony-winning role as Evan amongst a considerable All-Star Cast of industry vets and up-and-comers, has baity themes related to teen suicide and mental health, a well-suited director for said themes in Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower), not one but two Movie Bonus Songs, and much of the vocals for the songs being sung live on set (as with Les MisÃ©rables). But it was Tainted by the Preview (much like Cats), with many unflattering comments being made towards Ben's Dawson Casting and the musical's generally poor adaptation to film, and it came out in the Dump Month of September, meaning it would be all but forgotten by awards voters by December.
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Oscar Bait / int_969d3d9	comment	Valkyrie is a historical drama directed by Bryan Singer that portrays the failed plot of Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, played by Tom Cruise, to assassinate Hitler. In addition to Cruise, the film boasts an All-Star Cast composed of Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson, Kenneth Branagh, Eddie Izzard, Carice Van Houten, Thomas Kretschmann, Terence Stamp and Tom Hollander, among many others. The film came under fire for casting the non-German Cruise in the role of von Stauffenberg, and it did not obtain Oscar nominations.
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Oscar Bait / int_96b185bb	comment	There Will Be Blood was a Period Drama about the oil boom in Southern California during the early 20th century, but that's where the Oscar Bait qualities end - the movie's main character is a ruthless and sociopathic oilman who descends further into madness, greed, and cruelty the more successful he gets throughout the film, and eventually culminates in him driving away all of his loved ones, with his main rival being a weaselly False Prophet.
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Oscar Bait / int_974f7efb	comment	The Drew Carey Show parodies Emmy Bait with its fifth-season finale â€œA Very Special Drewâ€�. It includes: a homeless woman giving birth; Kate dying of a terminal disease on her wedding day; Drew battling his heretofore unheard-of lifelong illiteracy; Mimi battling her also heretofore unheard-of obsessive-compulsive disorder; Lewis snapping at people and reflecting on why out loud to the audience; Oswald taking up theft to be closer to his imprisoned father; Drew and Lewis volunteering to get shot so that theyâ€™d have a good death scene; and Mr. Wick developing an eating disorder. And a Littlest Cancer Patient, who gets the emmy. Whose Line Is It Anyway? had a sketch where Ryan Stiles has to report the weather as if it were a scene from an Oscar-winning film. He did so by ribbing host Drew Carey and referencing â€œA Very Special Drewâ€�.
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Oscar Bait / int_97a319b5	type	Oscar Bait
Oscar Bait / int_97a319b5	comment	From the Road to ... series: At the end of Road to Morocco, Bob Hope's character has accidentally blown up the ship, leaving the main cast stranded on a raft. Hope chews up the scenery, acting as if they've been stranded there for weeks. Then the camera pans up to reveal the New York City skyline. Bing Crosbyâ€™s character tells him to calm down, to which Hope bitterly remarks that theyâ€™ve ruined his chance for an Academy Award. In Road to Bali, Crosby finds the Oscar Humphrey Bogart won for The African Queen. Hope points out that Crosby already has an Oscar, snatches the trophy from him, and begins making an acceptance speech. (While Hope was never nominated for a competitive Oscar, he did win four Honorary Oscars and hosted the show a recorded fourteen times.)
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Oscar Bait / int_98c29814	comment	The Afterparty: Invoked. Culp describes that one of Germain's previous cases is being turned into a limited series with an All-Star Cast as a blatant awards play.
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Oscar Bait / int_98d2c872	comment	Serena is a bleak Period Piece set during The Great Depression, starring Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper (fresh from the success of Silver Linings Playbook) as a morally dubious timber tycoon and his increasingly unstable wife. It bombed critically and commercially and sat on the shelf for a year and a half.
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Oscar Bait / int_992367c2	comment	1931 film Skippy was an unexceptional little family movie about a nine-year-old boy who gets into mischief. Somehow it got four nominations, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Jackie Cooper (the youngest nominee ever), and it won Best Director for Norman Taurog. Even more amazing? It was based on a newspaper comic strip. It wasn't until the 2019 Oscars that another film based on a comic strip, comic book, or graphic novel (Black Panther) was nominated for Best Picture.
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Oscar Bait / int_99c003af	comment	Spoofed in The Boondocks episode â€œThe Color Ruckusâ€�, where Uncle Ruckus tells his depressing life story to Robert, Huey, and Riley, who canâ€™t help but listen because itâ€™s so sad.
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Oscar Bait / int_9b1636a1	comment	The Imitation Game was a biopic about Alan Turing, famous World War II-era codebreaker and later computer scientist, as played by Benedict Cumberbatch. It had the one-two punch of Turing being a genius, Inspirationally Disadvantaged, and gay in an era when that was very much disfavoured. It got plenty of nominations, but only won one Oscar for Best Screenplay. Ultimately, people pinned this on Artistic License â€“ History and the choice to exaggerate Turing's mental problems and downplay his homosexuality.
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Oscar Bait / int_9d189394	comment	Mock the Week:
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Oscar Bait / int_9d7ec380	comment	The Good Place: Episode 3x09, "Janets" was the last episode to air before the mid-season break, meaning only three episodes were left at the start of 2019. According to the show's official podcast, part of the reason they split the season up this way was so D'Arcy Carden's performance would be fresh in the minds of awards groups like the Golden Globes and SAG awards. The episode involves the other main characters transforming into a likeness of Janet, meaning Carden had to essentially play every character. Despite receiving praise for her performance(s), Carden failed to be nominated at any of the major groups. (The Emmys did nominate her for the following season, however.)
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Oscar Bait / int_9e0f7698	comment	The Hours checks all the boxes. It's a Costume Drama. It references homosexuality, AIDS, and the oppression of women. It has Nicole Kidman undergoing severe Beauty Inversion. And it has Meryl Streep in it.
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Oscar Bait / int_9f48001f	comment	Joker is, on its surface, a comic book movie, being inspired by Batmanâ€™s iconic arch-nemesis. However, it discards the bulk of the Batman mythos and associated tropes — including any fantastical content — in favor of a stylistic throwback to New Hollywood and the work of Martin Scorsese especially. It's an early 1980s Period Piece that presents Gotham City as an alternate version of The Big Rotten Apple, and the title character is seen in his pre-supervillain state as a pathetic, mentally ill would-be stand-up comedian who is constantly crushed underfoot by "The Man" until he snaps and accidentally starts a class war. Joaquin Phoenix lost a ton of weight to play the lead, too (so much that there were no opportunities for reshoots). Finally, despite its box office success, the film is not a blockbuster, having a very meager budget for an ostensibly comic book movie ($70 million) and being released during the award-baiting month of October. It was nominated for 11 Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Actor, and won many other awards, including the Venice International Film Festival's Leone d'Oro. Notably, after its release, virtually none of the media referred to it as a comic book/superhero movie, instead referring it solely as Psychological Thriller or the like.
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Oscar Bait / int_9f730680	comment	The film adaptation of Jersey Boys, itself a multiple Tony-winning musical, was a biopic of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons with an All-Star Cast.
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Oscar Bait / int_a20c421e	comment	The Hurt Locker, other than being a Post-9/11 Terrorism Movie, had very little going for it on the Oscar front; it had a low budget, no big stars, no big studio to promote it, and not even a political message. It wound up winning Best Picture in 2010, in spite of having at the time the lowest box office numbers of any Best Picture winner ever. One thing that did work in its favor was the narrative of Kathryn Bigelow becoming the first female director to win Best Director — over her ex-husband James Cameron (but some suggest that this was why she wasn't nominated for Zero Dark Thirty a few years later).
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Oscar Bait / int_a32b6a64	comment	The West Wing episode "The Long Goodbye" was painfully obviously designed to score Allison Janney an Emmy nomination. It did so by omitting most of the regular cast to show her character battling her father's Alzheimer's disease. This was particularly strange because Janney won four Emmys on her own over the course of the series, so she didn't need a weepy Emmy-bait episode.
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Oscar Bait / int_a332db0e	comment	Game Theorist Matthew Patrick on his second channel Film Theory spends fifteen minutes discussing the formula yielding the highest statistical chance of winning an Oscar.
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Oscar Bait / int_a506a38b	comment	In Wayne's World, Wayne gives a dramatic, teary-eyednote He didn't actually cry, he just splashed water in his face speech, while the words â€œOscar Clipâ€� are emblazoned over the shot. He even finished it off by claiming to be illiterate, which he then admitted wasn't true after "Oscar Clip" stopped flashing on the screen.
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Oscar Bait / int_a5880d89	comment	The Iron Lady, a biopic of Margaret Thatcher, is clear Oscar Bait, and not just because Thatcher is played by Meryl Streep. It didn't shy away from controversy, addressed Thatcher's struggle with dementia, is technically a Period Piece, and its initial release was in select theaters in Los Angeles and New York on December 30, 2011 — barely meeting the requirements to be eligible for the next year's Oscars. Observers joked that the Academy must have had a whole box of Oscars with Streepâ€™s name on them and was looking for an excuse to give them to her.
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Oscar Bait / int_a5d88e5c	comment	Annie Hall won Best Picture, Best Actress (Diane Keaton), Best Screenplay, and Best Director (Woody Allen). It was unusual in that it was a romantic comedy (although one with a Bittersweet Ending). It beat out Julia (a biopic about sticking it to the Nazis) and Star Wars to Best Picture as well.
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Oscar Bait / int_a8442db2	comment	In the same vein and in the same year as Fury Road, there was The Revenant, an ultraviolent pulp western, which got nominated for many Oscars and won three, including Best Director (Alejandro GonzÃ¡lez IÃ±Ã¡rritu's second consecutive win after Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)) and Best Actor (Leonardo Dicaprio's first).
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Oscar Bait / int_aade03f8	comment	The 1934 film It Happened One Night was a small, low-budget romantic comedy Road Movie, released during a time when Oscar Bait meant elaborate musical and dancing showcases. It gained universal acclaim from both critics and audiences and swept the "Big Five" awards: Best Picture, Best Director (Frank Capra), Best Actor (Clark Gable), Best Actress (Claudette Colbert), and Best Screenplay. This has only been done twice more in all the years since: by One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in 1976 and The Silence of the Lambs in 1992.
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Oscar Bait / int_aafa5498	comment	One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is one of only three films to win all of the â€œBig Fiveâ€� Oscars (Picture, Screenplay, Director, Actor, and Actress).note The other two, for those keeping score, are It Happened One Night and The Silence of the Lambs Oddly, though, the acting awards were given to actors who played non-mentally ill characters.
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Oscar Bait / int_ac64e9dc	comment	The Last of Us Part II has been accused by its detractors of being Oscar Bait in video game form, featuring a gay female protagonist in an extremely bleak and realistically violent revenge story set in a Zombie Apocalypse where the real focus is on human cruelty. While fan reception was divisive to say the least, it certainly wowed critics by sweeping The Game Awards 2020 and becoming the most awarded game of all time until Elden Ring. Some critics even went so far as to (in a positive way) call it gaming's Schindler's List moment.
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Oscar Bait / int_ae9fb66d	comment	Om Shanti Om: Parodied when Om has to play a blind deaf mute with no legs or arms. Sure, critics will love it but his fans will be bored.
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Oscar Bait / int_af7aead4	comment	Last Week Tonight with John Oliver has the Warren G. Harding biopic starring a wax sculpture thereof and Oscar-nominated actors.
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Oscar Bait / int_b0c66bf6	comment	Black Swan is a horror movie, and the director never denied that. (The producers, on the other hand, marketed it as a "Psychological Thriller"). It also features a lesbian sex scene, just to get eyeballs on it. It still got five Oscar nominations and was regarded as one of the best films of the year.
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Oscar Bait / int_b1072514	comment	Forrest Gump won four of the â€œBig Fiveâ€� (Actor, Director, Screenplay, and Picture) plus two more in 1994, and it centered around a mentally handicapped man. Itâ€™s considered a textbook example of how to win an Oscar because of its historical setting and social commentary. It was also a gigantic box-office hit long before the awards started rolling in, being released in the middle of the 1994 Summer Blockbuster season.
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Oscar Bait / int_b3685f53	comment	Argo was Very Loosely Based on a True Story of a group of American diplomats who escape the siege of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran during the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Ben Affleck plays a CIA agent who smuggles them out by having them pretend to be Canadians making a fake movie. It won three Oscars in 2013, including Best Picture.
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Oscar Bait / int_b36909d7	comment	Cats comes across as Universal's attempt to create the formula for the perfect Oscar-baiting musical adaptation, with the most blatant inspiration being Universal's own Les MisÃ©rables. It's based on one of the most popular and successful musicals ever, directed by Les Mis director Tom Hooper, who won the Best Director Oscar for directing Best Picture winner The King's Speech. It's live-action, appealing to the Academy's notorious anti-animation bias. It features an inevitable Movie Bonus Song written by the showâ€™s legendary creator Andrew Lloyd Webber and multi-Grammy winner Taylor Swift, plus an All-Star Cast to ensure more locks in the acting categories. To top it all off, previous Best Supporting Actress winner Jennifer Hudson sings "Memory", one of the most iconic songs in the history of show business, in a similar manner to fellow Supporting Actress winner Anne Hathaway with "I Dreamed a Dream". Even the much-touted "digital fur technology" would probably be worth a win for Best Visual Effects, or at least a nomination. Then the first trailer dropped, and it was all downhill from there. Outside of its six Razzie wins, the only positive awards attention it got was a Golden Globe nomination for Best Song and a Kids' Choice Awards nomination for Favorite Movie Actress for Swift (which probably had more to do with Swiftâ€™s general popularity than the actual quality of her performance (or lack thereof)).
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Oscar Bait / int_b36e17f1	comment	Nell is a drama film about a woman born and raised in a cabin in the woods of North Carolina, with almost no contact with other humans and who speaks her own hybridized language. It was widely seen, upon its release, as a vehicle for Jodie Foster, who plays the protagonist, to receive her third Best Actress Oscar after winning for The Accused and The Silence of the Lambs. Foster's portrayal of Nell received strongly divisive opinions from critics, yet she eventually got a nomination, losing to Jessica Lange for Blue Sky.
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Oscar Bait / int_b3f45286	comment	Derry Girls: In the first episode of the third season, the girls and James try to make a short film about The Troubles after hearing that, supposedly, a few kids from Germany made a short film about the Berlin Wall and won an Oscar.
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Oscar Bait / int_b51aff04	comment	Million Dollar Baby is about a disadvantaged woman who makes a place for herself in a traditionally male-dominated occupation — boxing. It has Morgan Freeman as the Narrator and stars Eastwood himself as a character who faces an intense moral dilemma near the end. It won four Oscars in 2004, including Best Picture and Best Actress for Hilary Swank, and it was also a sleeper hit at the box office. It may be saying something that the studio didn't plan to push the film for awards, but when they realized their awards season slate that year was unusually thin (initially, it looked like The Phantom of the Opera was going to get the big push) its release date was bumped up to take advantage of the season, suggesting it competed more on its own merits than campaigning.
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Oscar Bait / int_b7db5642	comment	Stranger Things dropped the first volume of Season 4 on May 27, 2022, four days before the 2022 cutoff. The most notable episode was "Dear Billy", a Max-focussed episode that deals with depression, suicidial ideations and survivor's guilt, giving Sadie Sink a lot of angsty material, before ending in massively emotional style via the use of the Kate Bush song "Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)". The show was nominated for Best Drama Series (losing to Succession) and got twelve Creative Arts nominations, winning five. Two of the wins, for music supervision and prosthetic make-up, were for "Dear Billy". Sadie Sink, however, failed to get an Emmy nomination despite the trades predicting one, although won a HCA award and ended 2022 with a much bigger profile.
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Oscar Bait / int_b9a0ee63	comment	Aloha is a melodramatic comedy, in the vein of the various "quirky" indie films that have been featured in Oscars categories, about a white military contractor who falls in love with an half-Asian, half-Hawaiian Air Force Captain while arranging the blessing of a pedestrian gate for a nearby space center under construction. The film's All-Star Cast and poster also reek of Oscar bait. It ended up bombing with critics and audiences (especially due to the whitewashing accusations coming from the casting of lily-white Emma Stone as said Air Force captain), it was dismissed by the Oscars, and the only awards love it received came in the form of three Teen Choice Award nominations. It was also ignored by the Razzies.
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Oscar Bait / int_ba084d45	comment	Hamilton, which centers around the titular character during the Revolutionary War, and has the special honor of being one of the only shows with a cast made up of people of color. It won 11 Tonys, and had 16 nominations in total. If you weren't Hamilton at the 2016 Tonys, there was no point in showing up.
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Oscar Bait / int_ba451529	comment	Speaking of the Palme d'Or, it was also just the third film in history to win both it and the Best Picture Oscar, this last happening back in 1956 with Marty.
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Oscar Bait / int_ba9b5c34	comment	Selma is a 2014 biopic of Martin Luther King Jr., depicting Dr. King's march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965 in support of the Civil Rights Act. It was released in the fallout from 12 Years a Slave and tried to tick the same boxes, with the added element of being directed by a woman of color, Ava DuVernay. But the Academy didn't take the bait; it won only Best Original Song, and it was nominated for but didn't win Best Picture.
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Oscar Bait / int_bac68a98	comment	The Help checks many boxes. It's a Period Piece set in The '60s whose main character is a white female reporter who helps out black maids, and itâ€™s also based on a best-selling novel.
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Oscar Bait / int_bac8c243	comment	The Mask has a shootout sequence where the Mask, after dodging a ridiculous number of bullets, turns into a cowboy and allows himself to be shot — so that he can give several Final Speeches (all Shout Outs to award-winning movies) and die in another characterâ€™s arms. Then the audience cheers, and he gets up and tearfully accepts an award. Even the mobsters shooting him check their hair and straighten their suits as if they were on TV.
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Oscar Bait / int_bc758ea9	comment	Tiny Toon Adventures: In "Hare Today, Gone Tomorrow", when Buster pretends to suffocate in the cage Elmyra put him in, Hamton shows up to give him an award for "Best Death on Daytime Television". In another episode, Meryl Streep receives an Oscar for "Best Ordering in a Restaurant". She puts it in a purse full of many other Oscars.
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Oscar Bait / int_bd54ba07	comment	In Blazing Saddles, villain Hedley Lamarr announces to his gang of thugs near the climax:
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Oscar Bait / int_c361604f	comment	In 2016, you had La La Land, in which an acclaimed young writer-director, whose previous film garnered an acting Oscar win, stretched his artistic muscles by doing a fresh take on The Musical, in a manner reminiscent of one of the great names in French New Wave cinema, Jacques Demy. It seemed like a lock for Best Picture. Then along came Moonlight, which Honest Trailers summed up thusly: "a young [checkmark], black [checkmark], gay [checkmark] man struggles to escape from poverty [checkmark] and drug addiction [checkmark] told across three decades [checkmark]. Based on a play [checkmark] based on the life story of its author [checkmark]." Surprising absolutely nobody, Moonlight won (though, thanks to an envelope mixup and ensuing confusion on the part of presenters Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, it took a few minutes to establish that for certain).
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Oscar Bait / int_c4a22754	comment	Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series: From "A Very Special, Award-Winning Episode of Zorc & Pals". In Yu-Gi-Oh!: Bonds Beyond Time Abridged:
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Oscar Bait / int_c61253f6	comment	Get Out is a horror movie about a black man in a white suburb and was released in February. It earned acclaim for not only its storyline, but its hidden social commentary, and was nominated for dozens of movie awards, winning quite a few, including the Best Screenplay Oscar, and in doing so became the first horror movie to win a Big Five Oscar since The Silence of the Lambs.
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Oscar Bait / int_c73e62a5	comment	Gran Torino was a film about a bigot's redemption, starring Eastwood himself. It didn't get nominated for an Oscar, but it did win Eastwood a special Palme d'Or at Cannes.
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Oscar Bait / int_ca069f01	comment	The Soup had a trailer for a fictional film called The Oscar Movie, with a voiceover discussing almost every Oscar Bait clichÃ© using clips from that yearâ€™s actual Oscar nominees. These include: â€œwomen distraught, crying, and/or screaming,â€� comedians in serious roles, Meryl Streep (mentioned at least three times), and â€œJohnny Depp doing something weird.â€�
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Oscar Bait / int_caa604e1	comment	Millennium Actress is a unique anime take on Oscar Bait. It's a weeper movie that opens with an old woman recalling her past through flashbacks, heavily features Been There, Shaped History-type period piece, and has a tragic ending. It failed to receive any nominations, even in Best Animated Feature, which had only three nominations that year (though it would have likely lost anyway to Finding Nemo).
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Oscar Bait / int_caa848c3	comment	Chocolat is a 2000 British-American romantic comedy-drama film adapted from a British novel, with an all-star cast (Juliette Binoche, Alfred Molina, Judi Dench, Lena Olin, Carrie-Anne Moss, and Johnny Depp), and with messages of personal emancipation, mainly female, and criticism of religious rigorism. The film received five Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. The film was very popular at the time of its release, but was stigmatized by criticism of the marketing of the production company Miramax
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Oscar Bait / int_cf97a783	comment	Napoleon is a near-three-hour-long epic American-British historical biopic film directed by Ridley Scott, written by David Scarpa, and starring Joaquin Phoenix as Napoleon Bonaparte and Vanessa Kirby as Josephine Beauharnais. It suffered criticism for its lack of historical accuracy, and its only Oscar nominations were for Best Achievement in Visual Effects, Best Achievement in Production Design and Best Achievement in Costume Design.
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Oscar Bait / int_d03ce8d5	comment	The Chaser's War On Everything sketch â€œOscar Baitâ€� spoofs many of the common elements of this trope. Itâ€™s a fake trailer for a film about a gay, disabled, artistic Jew whoâ€™s thrown in a concentration camp during World War II, trying to tick as many Oscar boxes at once. The lead actor even apparently killed himself after the film to invoke Dead Artists Are Better.
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Oscar Bait / int_d252ee3e	comment	The Great Ziegfeld, Best Picture winner of 1936, was three long hours of big Broadway musical and angsty melodrama. This lavish Biopic starred William Powell as the producer whose name, four years after his death (depicted in the filmâ€™s last scene), was the most legendary in show business.
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Oscar Bait / int_d4f4d313	comment	In Don't Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood, after parodying one of the dramatic scenes from Boyz n the Hood, the main character tells his girlfriend that he's trying to win the Best Black Actor at the Soul Train awards.
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Oscar Bait / int_d5ea1c25	comment	1978's The Deer Hunter was a game-changer. After a disastrous preview screening the studio brought in Allan Carr, a flamboyant producer (he was just coming off of Grease) and party-giver, as a consultant. He didn't expect much but loved the movie once he saw it. Still, he knew that it was so grim and depressing that people would only watch it if they had heard that it had been nominated for Oscars. Before then, it was the other way around — films (usually) got Oscar nominations based on their popular reception. Carr turned the system on its head and gave the film only a short run of screenings in New York and Los Angeles near the end of the year; the audience was mostly limited to film critics and Academy members. The former raved about the film, and the latter nominated it for multiple Oscars; it ultimately won Best Picture and Director among other honors. Only then was it put into wide release to the general public. To an extant however, its Oscar campaign is a bit of an Unbuilt Trope. Since the film was already completed before Carr entered the picture, it was not originally intended to be an Oscar Bait film as we know it today. If anything, it became one out of financial reasons more than anything else: the film had a then-high budget of $15 Million and was not expected to make its investment back. This was especially a concern since the Vietnam War was still fresh in the public's mind and a film about the conflict may alienate a potential audience. So Carr hoped that the Oscar campaign would enable positive word-of-mouth to spread to the general public and enable the film to make back a profit. And it worked; The Deer Hunter made back more than three-times its budget and was among the top 10 highest grossing films of 1978. This is pretty different from many current Oscar Bait Films which, as described above, tend not to do well at the box office and typically are made to get nominations & prestige.
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Oscar Bait / int_dac2531c	comment	Baywatch tried several times to net itself an Emmy with various Very Special Episodes dealing with death or another weighty topic. Despite all their efforts, it never worked and the show failed to even get nominated during its entire run.
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Oscar Bait / int_dc939b15	comment	Green Zone is a Post-9/11 Terrorism Movie which tried to have an Anvilicious anti-war message but only really proved that Truffaut Was Right. It starred Matt Damon and was directed by Paul Greengrass, so it had the star power, too. But it got pushed back and was panned by critics when it was released.
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Oscar Bait / int_dee37309	comment	In the Heights centers around an inspirational Fourth of July where impoverished immigrants in Washington Heights win the lottery and struggle with issues of college debt, gentrification, and American identity. The characters angst over everything, including (but not limited to): boatloads of Unresolved Sexual Tension, the hypocrisy of The American Dream, the expenses of living in the heights, and the death of a beloved community member. Sprinkle in some modern, catchy infusions of hip-hop and salsa music, and you have a Tony-winning musical. It was nominated for thirteen categories, winning four (but none for writing).
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Oscar Bait / int_e0f3d2b6	comment	Honest Trailers mocked Anne Hathaway's role as Fantine in Les MisÃ©rables (2012) as this, crediting her as "I Really Really Really Wanted To Win An Oscar".
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Oscar Bait / int_e293455a	comment	Buffy the Vampire Slayer: "The Body" is a massive tearjerker episode where the cast deals with Joyce's death and seems to be pushing all the Emmy Bait buttons. It didn't get a nomination, but the No-Dialogue Episode "Hush" did.
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Oscar Bait / int_e33d4fd9	comment	The film adaptation of the stage play August: Osage County, a heavy tragicomedy about a dysfunctional family with a stellar cast that included Oscar winners (Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts), was billed as "Oscar-bait turned to 11" by a headline in the British newspaper The Guardian. The presence of Streep in the cast, the themes covered and the fact that the film was produced by The Weinstein Company certainly weighed in such an assessment.
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Oscar Bait / int_e7bb061c	comment	Everything Everywhere All at Once touches on themes of Generational Trauma, nihilism, and is about the reparation of a mother-daughter relationship. Sounds like something the Academy would love. What did you say? It's also a humorous, action-heavy, and very surreal trip into The Multiverse, featuring concepts like a universe where everyone has hot dogs for fingers, sentient rocks, and an everything bagel capable of destroying universes? OK, maybe not so much. But it was distributed by A24, a studio that's carved out a special niche with quirky, auteur-driven Genre-Busting movies that do well with critics and audiences alike, and it became a Sleeper Hit that gradually gained traction throughout the 2022 awards season (and since A24 distributed the aforementioned Moonlight, they know how to navigate the awards circuit). It got eleven Oscar nominations, the most of any film that year, including Best Picture, and became the first film ever to win six of the seven topline Oscars (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Original Screenplay, with Best Film Editing giving it a seventh win).
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Oscar Bait / int_e99cad83	comment	The Fast Show spoofs the trope with the film Cute Disabled Man, which wins an award for â€œBest Portrayal of a Disabled Person by a Fit and Healthy Young Actor Who Wants to Win an Oscarâ€�.
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The Fast Show	hasFeature	Oscar Bait / int_e99cad83
Oscar Bait / int_ea4f62db	type	Oscar Bait
Oscar Bait / int_ea4f62db	comment	Family Guy gives us the self-explanatory "Emmy-Winning Episode." Peter and his family spend the 20 minutes trying to copy the clichÃ©s of Emmy-winning shows to try and get one of their own.
Oscar Bait / int_ea4f62db	featureApplicability	1.0
Oscar Bait / int_ea4f62db	featureConfidence	1.0
Family Guy	hasFeature	Oscar Bait / int_ea4f62db
Oscar Bait / int_ef02d24f	type	Oscar Bait
Oscar Bait / int_ef02d24f	comment	Nerd To The Third Power host Dr. Gonzo swore up and down that Precious would win Best Picture (based on his belief that Oscar winners were always the most depressing movie on the docket), because â€œit's about an underprivileged black rape victim who gives birth to an incest baby with down syndrome. I haven't even seen the movie and I already want to kill myself! It has to win!" (It didnâ€™t; The Hurt Locker did.)
Oscar Bait / int_ef02d24f	featureApplicability	1.0
Oscar Bait / int_ef02d24f	featureConfidence	1.0
Nerd To The Third Power (Podcast)	hasFeature	Oscar Bait / int_ef02d24f
Oscar Bait / int_ef805f6a	type	Oscar Bait
Oscar Bait / int_ef805f6a	comment	The Departed was gritty, violent, and serious, but it was also not a war movie, very profane (relative to most Oscar Bait), and otherwise didn't touch on Oscar-baity subjects. And it won Best Picture. It was directed by Martin Scorsese, who had previously whiffed on the more baity The Aviator and Gangs of New York — although this led some observers to believe that its win was a "lifetime achievement" Oscar to make up for Scorsese not winning for previous line of work.
Oscar Bait / int_ef805f6a	featureApplicability	1.0
Oscar Bait / int_ef805f6a	featureConfidence	1.0
The Departed	hasFeature	Oscar Bait / int_ef805f6a
Oscar Bait / int_f056cb29	type	Oscar Bait
Oscar Bait / int_f056cb29	comment	American Sniper was a rather controversial Biopic which starred Bradley Cooper as Chris Kyle, a Navy SEAL noted for racking up a high kill count during the Iraq War.
Oscar Bait / int_f056cb29	featureApplicability	1.0
Oscar Bait / int_f056cb29	featureConfidence	1.0
American Sniper	hasFeature	Oscar Bait / int_f056cb29
Oscar Bait / int_f11210ae	type	Oscar Bait
Oscar Bait / int_f11210ae	comment	Mona Lisa Smile, directed by Mike Newell, and starring Julia Roberts, featured a charismatic teacher as protagonist, and addressed themes such as female emancipation and pursuit of personal freedom versus old-fashioned social conservatism, thus ticking some boxes; however, the film suffered from comparisons to its more notorious predecessor Dead Poets Society, and it came to be dubbed the "Dead Housewives Society". The movie received mixed to negative reviews from film critics, and received no Oscar nominations.
Oscar Bait / int_f11210ae	featureApplicability	1.0
Oscar Bait / int_f11210ae	featureConfidence	1.0
Mona Lisa Smile	hasFeature	Oscar Bait / int_f11210ae
Oscar Bait / int_f1da64b5	type	Oscar Bait
Oscar Bait / int_f1da64b5	comment	The Lord of the Rings is a strange case; although it is fantasy, it was also adapted from one of literature's most important and ground-breaking fantasy works, and it was also a huge spectacle that changed the game in epic filmmaking. But what was truly unexpected was for The Return of the King to sweep its awards. Perhaps its wins were meant to be for the trilogy as a whole — it was filmed as one project, so it might have been unfair for it to eat up all the important awards for all three years it was released over — but that is still a phenomenal accomplishment for a fantasy film series. More cynical explanations involve the series' great commercial success: either the Academy felt unable to ignore such a big hit, or it wanted to reward the series for helping the cinema industry by getting so many people through the door.
Oscar Bait / int_f1da64b5	featureApplicability	1.0
Oscar Bait / int_f1da64b5	featureConfidence	1.0
The Lord of the Rings	hasFeature	Oscar Bait / int_f1da64b5

The following is a list of statements referring to the current page from other pages.

Pompo: The Cinéphile / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
John K. Stuff (Blog) / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
A Mighty Heart	seeAlso	Oscar Bait
A Star Is Born (2018) / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
American Fiction / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
American Gangster / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Ammonite / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Babel / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Belfast / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Blazing Saddles / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Blood Diamond / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Boys Don't Cry / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Chocolat / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Cinderella Man / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Cleopatra / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Dances with Wolves / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Finding Forrester / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
For Your Consideration / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Get Shorty / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Ghost (1990) / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Green Book / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Heaven's Gate / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Heneral Luna / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Hulk / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Invictus / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Joy (2015) / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
La Vie en Rose / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Les MisÃ©rables (1998) / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Life Is Beautiful / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Malcolm & Marie / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Malcolm X / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Man on the Moon / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Million Dollar Baby / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
My Left Foot / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Om Shanti Om / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Phenomenon / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Rachel Getting Married / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Rain Man / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Saving Mr. Banks / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Secretariat / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Shakespeare in Love / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Snakes on a Plane / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
The Day the Clown Cried / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
The Deer Hunter / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
The Elephant Man / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
The Great Ziegfeld / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
The Green Mile / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
The Help / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
The January Man / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
The King's Speech / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
The Lovely Bones / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
The Mask / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
The Naked Gun / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
The Pianist / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
The Post / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
The Pursuit of Happyness / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
The Sessions / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
The Wrestler / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
There Will Be Blood / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Tropic Thunder / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Walk the Line / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Wayne's World / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Young@Heart / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
A Single Man / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Cold Mountain / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Mommie Dearest / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Nyaruko: Crawling with Love! / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Ordinary People / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Revolutionary Road / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
The Blind Side / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
The Player / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
The Reader / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
BioPic	seeAlso	Oscar Bait
CinderellaMan	seeAlso	Oscar Bait
HulksLaw	seeAlso	Oscar Bait
Lanthorn	seeAlso	Oscar Bait
MerylStreep	seeAlso	Oscar Bait
Ptitle73f32qzu	seeAlso	Oscar Bait
RachelGettingMarried	seeAlso	Oscar Bait
TheFuture2011Movie	seeAlso	Oscar Bait
Baywatch / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Boston Legal / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Dix pour cent / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Extras / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Made in Canada / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Married... with Children / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Mr. Show / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Power Rangers Time Force / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
The Afterparty / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
The Amazing Race / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
The Chaser's War On Everything / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
The Colbert Report / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
The Comeback / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
The Other Two / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
30 Rock / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
TV Tropes Superhero Team / Sugar Wiki / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (Theatre) / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Nine (Musical) (Theatre) / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Sunday in the Park with George (Theatre) / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Ratchet: Deadlocked (Video Game) / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Choice of Games / Videogame / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Fully Ramblomatic (Web Animation) / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Super-Hero-Bowl! (Web Animation) / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
A Trailer for Every Academy Award Winning Movie Ever (Web Video) / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Action Button (Web Video) / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Baywatching (Web Video) / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Brandon's Cult Movie Reviews (Web Video) / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
History of Power Rangers (Web Video) / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Midnight Screenings (Web Video) / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Multiplex (Webcomic) / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Batman Beyond / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Finding Nemo	seeAlso	Oscar Bait
He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (1983) / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Over the Garden Wall / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Pocahontas / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
The Boondocks / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Toy Story 3 / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
Om Shanti Om / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait
In & Out / int_acedb8f5	type	Oscar Bait

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