Reduced budgets leads to more quality in awards nominees

Less money to spend on marketing – either as a whole or specifically geared around garnering awards – has led some to see this year’s entries in the awards mix as being a cut above in quality.

The thinking seems to go like this: Because there’s less money at the studios to spend on campaigns, there is more room for smaller movies that are of a higher quality but which lack the resources to gain awareness and make an impression.

Yes, the studios, their specialty arms (those that are surviving) and the mini-majors have less cash on hand in these tough economic times. So movies that are good but which might not be great aren’t being advertised heavily, to the point where they become assumptive nominees or winners. In their place are coming smaller movies that are actually better but which, in previous years, would have been drowned out by all the advertising buying going on.

Personally I think that argument is about 65 percent right. The other 35 percent of the difference between then (last year) and now is that 1) There isn’t a bevy of Iraq War movies that are creating an easy journalistic hook on which to hang “the indie sky is falling” stories and 2) Filmmakers are finding new and different ways to connect with audiences and get their movies seen. Online distribution, Facebook fan pages…these and more are all changing the industry landscape, allowing independents to do more with less, a lesson the majors and their ilk have yet to fully learn.

While this should be viewed as a universal good (better movies with more awareness means people are watching those better movies) there seems to be a meme that floated through the industry press a week or so about that indies were causing problems for themselves by becoming so successful. I’m not sure what the thinking here was – that movies should trip themselves up in order to maintain the illusion of superiority – but a lot of smart people embraced it.