Distribution Advocates Presents: The Truth About Awards (Episode 2)

Are awards campaigns worth the hype? Are they right for your film?

Filmmakers successful in running an awards season campaign tell their story and unveil underlying capital systems dominating the awards landscape. This episode features conversations with Matt Stoller, Abby Sun, Rintu Thomas, Sushmit Ghosh, and Kaila Sarah Hier.

Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and iHeartRadio.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Matt Stoller:

With award shows, now you have these big campaigns to win these awards. If it’s a question of who spends a lot of money to win an award, the significance of the award is going to diminish. The Oscars, for example, are not a signifier for people about what interesting movies might be out there.

Avril Speaks:

And it also makes me think about audience too. I keep coming back to audience and how all of this affects the people that we make films for.

Hello out there and welcome to Distribution Advocates Presents. I am your host, Avril Speaks, producer, filmmaker, and co-founder of Distribution Advocates. Our team has commissioned this series of conversations where we delve into concerns about the current landscape of independent film distribution. We’ll chat with folks who are navigating these spaces, debunk some outdated myths and look to innovative, sustainable, and equitable solutions for distributing films to their waiting audiences. In this episode, we’ll take a look at the awards system and the massively expensive campaign runs that have taken it over.

I’m joined by fellow Distribution Advocates’ co-founder Abby Sun, who has served on awards committees for the IDA Documentary Awards, Gotham Awards and Cinema Eye [Honors].

Abby Sun:

So good to see you.

Avril Speaks:

I know. It’s good to see you too. How’s it going?

Abby Sun:

Every single day, I have a close brush with the awards campaign organizing ecosystem. IDA [International Documentary Association] is very involved in it because of our fall screening series, which is awards campaign focused.

Avril Speaks:

So you’re on here talking about awards and you’re literally in the middle of this right now. Can you tell us a bit about your awards experience?

Abby Sun:

I started out as a film festival programmer. I worked for film festivals that actually didn’t have competition sections so I started out in a way that was very non-competitive and really about community building. I started programming at regional documentary film festivals. And then also because I was a film festival programmer, I started being invited onto nominating committees and selection committees for many of the end of year awards that we have. For example, before I started working here at IDA, I was on three separate juries or nominating committees for IDA’s own Documentary Awards, which are the world’s oldest awards purely for documentary film. But I’ve also been on the nominating committees for the Gotham’s documentary award and also for Cinema Eye [Honors], which gives out lots of awards in different categories to documentary films. I’ve landed at IDA where now I run educational seminars for documentary filmmakers and our industry conference. And one of the number one requests that we get for event programming is: “Are awards campaigns worth it for documentary filmmakers?”

Avril Speaks:

It’s also interesting that that’s become such a part of strategy and the goal and the end result of filmmakers is how do I get an award. It’s become an interesting piece of how filmmakers get recognized, how films get recognized or not. So many producers and investors and filmmakers themselves even now see awards as the ultimate goal, sometimes even more so than breaking even, which results in large amounts of resources and money and time poured into campaigns with little potential for recoupment, if any. So you actually spoke with filmmakers Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh about their campaign run for Writing with Fire, which received an Oscar nomination for Best Feature Documentary in 2021.

Abby Sun:

Yeah. Rintu and Sushmit self-organized their own Oscar campaign and were able to get nominated in the end.

Avril Speaks:

Let’s get into what they had to say about the awards process and navigating that system.

Rintu Thomas:

My name is Rintu Thomas. I’m a filmmaker. I direct, produce films and I’m based in New Delhi, India.

Sushmit Ghosh:

My name is Sushmit Ghosh, and I’m basically married to Rintu. I’m also a filmmaker based in India. Rintu and I met in film school. We founded a film company called Black Ticket Films in 2009 with this big dream of making films that will change the world and all of that. And it’s been an adventure.

Abby Sun:

Thank you, Rintu and Sushmit, for joining us. As part of your adventure, you made a film called Writing with Fire which was nominated for an Oscar. So what happened? How did it get all the way up to the Oscars?

Rintu Thomas:

When the film was selected for Sundance, it felt like this is it. This is the perfect launch for this baby that took half a decade of our lives to come into being. We had sales agents and the film won two awards including an audience award, which is a good sign that a global distribution is coming, but it didn’t come. There were several reasons mentioned by the sales agents. It’s a pandemic year. There’s a whole glut of films. It’s a subtitled film. It’s a film on journalists, which usually doesn’t really do well and all sorts of things. But as the film traveled from one festival to the other, it just kept winning awards, which was a sign of okay, it’s speaking to the world. By the end of the year, we didn’t have any distributors so it was just like, how do we keep expanding the life of this film? And a lot of filmmaker friends, especially in the US, are like, you folks should do an Academy campaign.

Abby Sun:

What is an Academy awards campaign for a film? What are the components? What do you do?

Rintu Thomas:

You start with the understanding that this is not about the best film, whatever that means. This is about the film that has the best publicity, is best seen and is best heard in the whisper network.

Sushmit Ghosh:

I think a lot of filmmakers come into this for the first time with a clear-eyed understanding that it’s not really a system that is based on merit. It is not necessarily the best films that will always get spoken about. When I say best, that is always in quotes. And really early on, we decided to speak to a lot of filmmakers and folks from the industry and thought leaders and people started connecting us to directors and producers who had done successful awards campaigns.

Rintu Thomas:

We decided let’s reach out to them and say, “What did they do that worked? What did they do that did not work?”

Sushmit Ghosh:

Really, it’s almost like running for political office. You are one of the candidates. You want people to vote for you and that’s exactly why it’s called a campaign. But you have to do it in an elegant way, in a sophisticated way. The system is designed in a way where it is a race that you need to run strategically.

Rintu Thomas:

The industry in general needs to see you as a contender, as somebody in the race because by qualifying, it doesn’t naturally mean that everybody knows that they need to vote for you. You have to have a publicist, beautifully curated screenings where members are invited, dine, wine, and then you activate the whisper network. There are strict rules around canvassing voters. Yet we realized that while these were the rules, there are loopholes. It’s not possible to do this without publicists creating a roadmap but we also didn’t have a lot of money. A lot of all of this was simply not possible. The economics were against us.

Abby Sun:

What is the amount that it costs?

Sushmit Ghosh:

You need to have a significant sum of money to be able to do this in a way that can be gratifying and effective. You need to have a budget for publicists. Now you have publicists on the American side, but ideally you also need to have a publicist who knows how to engage with international voters because the documentary branch right now is the most diverse branch within the Academy. So you’re looking at two sets of publicists while doing the academy campaign. You also want to run for the BAFTA, which is on the British side, a separate set of expectations and costs, etc. A lot of us get pulled into it because a lot of folks are like, “Hey, the title’s going to get amplified. Voters across the pool will know about this. Why don’t I run that campaign as well?” But that’s an additional cost. But you need to start with bare minimum, I would say at least a $50,000 base structure, and then start building tactical partnerships, allies, and raising funds for the news organizations.

Avril Speaks:

Wow, $50,000 minimum, and as I understand it, that was on the low end because Rintu and Sushmit ran their campaign during a pandemic year when most screenings were virtual. The general base cost for a campaign is usually closer to $200,000.

Abby Sun:

Yeah, the costs are really steep. I briefly spoke with publicist Kaila Hier about awards publicity as well. Though she herself is not specifically an awards publicist, she mentioned some concerning practices that she’s noticed.

Kaila Sarah Hier:

I’m Kaila Sarah Hier. I am a film publicist working a lot in genre films and smaller independent films, genre film festivals and also recently into the whole New York art house theatrical scene.

Abby Sun:

Would you ever want to get into awards publicity?

Kaila Sarah Hier:

It’s a whole different world. You got to play ball. If one of these smaller distributors thinks they really have a chance at something for an Oscar win, they can hire up to four firms. Two for North America, two for international. And each of those firms, who knows how many people is involved? It’s a beast. It’s also, from what I can understand, a potential massive money hole for a lot of these distributors that could very heavily backfire. It’s also so far from what I personally do, and this is just my outside experience, but award PR is really just playing ball and how many flashy LA screenings could you set up, what cool filmmaker can you have to introduce your filmmaker. And there’s a version of that that’s valuable on the theatrical roadshow situation too, where we ask our filmmakers to always bring out your cool friends to host a Q&A with you. Anyone that has a social media following, they should moderate your Q&A.

When we really think about awards PR and the insane amount of money involved in it and the awards structure in itself, what does it really benefit? I don’t know who it benefits.

Abby Sun:

Yeah, it’s an even narrower slice of the dream that filmmakers and distributors are chasing because it’s incredibly difficult to get into Sundance and into TIFF, but it’s easier than getting nominated for an Oscar.

Kaila Sarah Hier:

Yeah.

Abby Sun:

So even from a publicist perspective, somebody who has a below-the-surface understanding of the ways these campaigns work, the methods and shape of the system raises eyebrows, especially financially. And this has been a problem that’s been recorded for a while. You can find articles on IDA’s Documentary magazine website from 2010 with Marshall Curry and Alex Gibney giving their tips on how to keep an Oscar campaign low. Costs of campaigns have been increasing for about a decade and a half, two decades, but it’s really escalated in the last three to four years. Right now, the landscape has been morphed by the introduction of streamers into the prestige documentary marketplace. What I mean by that is that the streamers, especially the ones that are tech money-funded—so the Apple TV+s, the Amazon Studios, the Netflixes of the world—they’re not considering acquisitions of documentaries in the traditional sense: “How much is this going to make when I release it into the public marketplace?” For them, they have discovered that it is a lot cheaper comparatively to run an awards campaign for a documentary film than it is to run a best picture awards campaign.

Avril Speaks:

So you’re saying that streamers are switching into the documentary award space to build prestige for their brands instead of competing in the fictional awards categories, which have even more costly campaigns. As a result, their primary criteria for independent acquisition has switched to awards potential rather than audience engagement. How has this shift in focus affected the economics surrounding awards considering the immense buying power of these streamers backed by big tech or industry giants?

Abby Sun:

What we have seen in the last few years in documentaries specifically is this rapid escalation of budget for awards campaign marketing and also in purchase prices for documentary films themselves. It created this inflated expectation on filmmakers’ end of the importance of participating in these awards campaigns and the expectation that a documentary film could be worth tens of millions of dollars.

Avril Speaks:

Can you break down the realities of award campaigns entering a film into the awards cycle and just talk about the realities of what that actually entails?

Abby Sun:

The traditional actual activities that distributors and filmmakers engage in for an awards campaign primarily consists of email writing and awards campaign screenings. That can include the fall film festivals. Film festivals have awards too, typically. There are film festival awards that are closely linked to award season success. If we’re talking at the highest level, for example, for Oscar Best Picture, then traditionally the audience award at TIFF is considered a marker of frontrunner status for Best Picture Oscar. Also, it includes things like your traditional marketing, such as advertisements and marketing email blasts through organizations that targeted members and subscribers to specific email lists that have a likelihood of having Academy voters or whoever are the voters for the awards subscribed. And then finally, a lot of work to get print and press coverage of the individual films that are doing an awards campaign. That could be anything from pitching publications on profiles of the filmmakers to getting reviews of the film. There are entire websites and sections of all of the film trades that run prediction lists, the cottage industry of awards publications.

Avril Speaks:

Right. And in fact, many of the most impactful publications in the award system are under PMC, the Penske Media Corporation owned by Jay Penske. So there are also inherent ethical dilemmas and bias in that level of consolidation while projecting industry judgment. In Vanity Fair’s coverage of PMC, Katie Rosman is on record stating that PMC’s trade publications has made it “a prime landing spot for tens of millions of dollars spent annually on Oscars and Emmy advertising.” I know as a filmmaker award shows and their hosts institutions, they’ve found very creative ways to squeeze more money out of filmmakers to participate in the system. Beyond submission fees, which are usually hundreds of dollars, they might charge filmmakers to upload a screener of the film to the viewing portal or even more common, to send an email to voting members about the availability of a film in the screening room.

Abby Sun:

So sometimes you’ll end up in situations where films will get nominated or they’ll become a finalist in an award, but then the nonprofit that is running the award ceremony will charge the film team $2,000 or $5,000 to upload a file of their film to the online streaming portal so that their members can view the film and vote on it. So of course, if you don’t pay the fee to upload your film, then very few people will be able to watch the film and be able to vote on your film.

Avril Speaks:

You, Rintu and Sushmit also talked about navigating their campaign with an economic disadvantage.

Abby Sun:

So after eligibility, the publicist, starting with the $50,000 minimum, which you did not have, what did you do?

Sushmit Ghosh:

We went in with a very clear strategy. We basically reached out to both our EPs, Hallee Adelman and Patty Quillin, and said, “Listen, we are thinking of doing the campaign. It might seem like an outrageous idea but let’s just look at the shortlist. This is how much we need. Can you help us?” So Haley and Patty jumped on board and at the end of it, we will all come out with learnings if not anything else. We brought on a team of publicists. That was the first expense. Then essentially between Rintu and me, we galvanized community around the film. That was the theme of the campaign. So what do we need to do to do that? And it was essentially reaching out to filmmakers and friends and telling them that we are in the race.

Rintu Thomas:

So then we decided, let’s make multiple goals. We can’t spend all of this money, but we’re going to spend money. We’re going to spend time. The ideal goal is to get to the shortlist and then to the nomination. But if that were not to happen and the odds were definitely against us, what are the two or three other things that we could gain from this investment? I think we had this great greed for the film to be watched, and the ask was, “Give us your 90 minutes. Just watch the film.” And we felt like if people watched the film, it would be easier to convince them that this is a film that needs support. We decided that we would tie our impact campaign with it. Wherever we did these screenings, we galvanized a lot of people who would actually amplify the film.

Sushmit Ghosh:

And I think once they saw us and once we spoke to them, then they started reaching out to their friends and we did a limited theatrical release in the US.

Rintu Thomas:

We also reached out to our funders and said, “Will you host the screening?” So what that does is amplify the film through their network. So when they put it out as a newsletter, inviting people in their database to the screening that they are hosting, it just immediately reaches more people than you can do individually. And because we didn’t have the funds to host post-screening drinks or parties, there was a bar right across the street, a restaurant actually. After the screening, we just got people together for a round of drinks. That really helped create momentum in New York. With the theatrical itself, we used the theatrical as a way to kick off the campaigning. You just start experimenting. Whoever we reached out to, filmmakers whose work we’ve loved, admired, who were a part of the voting community, they all turned up to do these virtual Q&As and we really used the space of social media to put them out there.

The campaigning is really about building a perception that your film stands a chance. A lot changed after Netflix won its first Oscar. The campaigning pivoted after the OTTs came in with the budgets that they can come with. So you’re competing against seasoned workflows. Sometimes you can’t compete with entrenched systems so you just have to create something completely different, innovative, inventive, especially when you are strapped for money.

Avril Speaks:

So Abby, do you think that there’s any way to shift this awards landscape?

Abby Sun:

In terms of what filmmakers should do, since I’ve been working at IDA, I have heard from filmmakers that we should be doing events discussing how to decrease the cost of awards campaigns because it’s become such a financial burden on independent filmmakers. That’s why IDA has the Awards Campaign Access Initiative, which is essentially just a grant for filmmakers, but it’s an in-kind grant because IDA is donating our services. But even this solution points to the ways that non-profit films, film festivals, publications, are totally entwined with the awards campaign ecosystem right now because most corporate sponsorship money, most of the corporate advertising dollars—whatever you name it, that is from corporate streamers, distributors—all of the money that’s contributed to many of these film non-profits, they come in the three-month period that is awards season every single fall.

So many of these film non-profits and film publications are completely reliant on the awards campaign season right now. We’ve become so reliant on them over the last 10 years that to divorce the organization’s yearly budget and finances in the award season would now constitute rethinking the entire way that revenue is generated for these organizations. There are some film non-profits—IDA is not one of them—but there are some film non-profits where it’s been reported in Eric Kohn’s former column in IndieWire that 90% of their annual operating budget comes from corporate dollars. And if 90% comes from corporate dollars, I can tell you 100% that most of that money is coming from the fall awards season. So that’s just how reliant these organizations are. And this includes things like dirt-baggy, volunteer, or very cinephiliac publications and organizations like Screen Slate and Film Comment in New York. I have received awards campaign “For Your Consideration” emails from those publications as well. So they’re definitely also getting dollars from awards campaigns, and in many cases, that’s the only revenue generation that they have. We’re all very reliant on this system right now. I would not rely on institutions to save filmmakers from this because institutions are incentivized right now to keep it going.

Avril Speaks:

So it’s interesting. I interviewed Barbara Twist who talked a lot about exhibition and she made a similar point about funding. Even when you talk about non-profits and things like labs, there’s a lot of support for production but there’s not a ton of support for exhibition. Thinking about what you’re saying, if we took some of that money and focused on exhibition or getting your film out to audiences or distribution, maybe there’s a chance to add equity and spreading access to these films that we’re making.

Abby Sun:

Yeah. Just in terms of equity, access and scale, in documentary film, there’s 800 members of the documentary branch in the Academy of Motion Pictures and Science. So that’s 800 people who create the shortlist. That’s 15 films that are not finalists but are basically nominated for the Oscars for Best Feature Documentary and then there are five films that become the finalists. These are the things that the documentary branch selects by itself. And then after the five finalists, then it’s open to every single member of the Academy to vote. So all of the early season awards campaigns in documentary film are aimed at these 800 members of the Academy. The distributors, the streamers, all of the money is spent on trying to get the attention of just 800 people in the world as opposed to any general audience, general public, or even people who would be interested in the subject matter or the issue or the impact of the film. Especially in documentary film, if the purpose is impact or the purpose is pushing the form or the purpose is artistry, only targeting 800 people seems a really misguided and lopsided use of resources, right?

Avril Speaks:

It’s funny when you break it down like that, honestly, I feel like that’s the conversation right there. We’re focusing on 800 people, but it’s like we always say with Distribution Advocates whenever we have our teach-ins, what is your goal as a filmmaker? Is your end result in making the film? Is it eyeballs? Do you want money? Do you want impact? When you break it down into those numbers, 800 members who are part of the Academy versus the world, it becomes a different conversation about who we’re reaching and who we’re trying to attract.

I do often ask myself this question about audience, especially when it comes to awards and their value. You always hear these reports, especially in the last couple years of how Oscar attendance is going down. People who are outside of LA, outside of New York, people I know who are just living their everyday life. And I’m not talking about people I know in the industry. The Oscars don’t really define what they watch. At the same time, when you say, “Oh, this is an Oscar-winning film,” it does have some type of clout, but it’s also a question of: it has clout with who? I’m just throwing that out there as something to discuss and pontificate about. I don’t necessarily have an answer to it. But I see your point. If you want to reach the largest audience possible, it is something that I think about in terms of the value of these awards that we’re seeking out versus the value of an audience, the value of eyeballs on your film that are outside of the industry.

Abby Sun:

And of course the argument is if you get nominated for an Oscar or the film wins the Oscar, then more people will want to watch it. Even if that were true, which I have to assume there’s some truth in it, I’m not sure the money invested into the awards campaign is actually correlated with any actual increase afterwards. But we’ll also not really know because the last couple of winners were all streamer documentaries so we don’t have any data. We don’t know at all if it has translated into viewership and public awareness. But I think that argument is a little bit of an excuse because certainly the vast majority of films that participate in the awards campaign process don’t receive a single nomination for anything. So those are sunk costs that can’t be returned when it comes to general audience development. I think Avril, you bring up a really good point in terms of for whom it makes a difference and what type of difference it makes. In a person-who-doesn’t-work-in-film’s mind, what does an Oscar-winning film mean?

Maybe it has some ties to quality but also to me, this is a little bit of a dangerous road to go down if we are thinking about the health of independent film in general because there’s only one film winning the Oscar for Best Documentary a year. How many independent fiction films even get nominated for Oscars these days? It’s all streamer and studio fare. The independent films that get nominated are in the Best International Feature category these days, plus the random viral marketing campaign. We could debate whether or not A24 is an indie. It’s certainly a super indie at this point, but if you take all the A24 films out of the mix, what is really left?

So if we are tying ourselves to awards as a marker of quality and it costs so much money to run a successful awards campaign, then what we are actually doing as a field—and this is exactly what the streamers want—we are actually narrowing for our general audience, for society, a conception of what a worthy, an artistic film is, because we’re tying it to something that is a hidden gatekeeper as opposed to developing different audience conceptions of what is an independent film, what is an artistic documentary. Whatever it is, we want to develop a robust viewership around an understanding of films. If everything is, “Oh, it was nominated for this award,” then we actually just narrow the types of films that we are telling our audience is valuable to watch, right?

Avril Speaks:

And I think the audience will tell us what those films are, what films they value. That’s also a larger conversation as well for exhibition and distribution. But I do think the audience is telling us every day what they want and it’s not necessarily what we want to hear.

That’s all for this episode of Distribution Advocates Presents. Tune in for our other series installments discussing the landscapes of film school, film festivals, distribution, sales agents, and exhibition. This episode is produced by Moso Haus. Our producer is Nacey Watson Johnson, our supervising producer is Ivana Tucker and our production manager is Samiah Adams. Sound design is by Emily Crain. Special thanks to the team at Distribution Advocates, Abby Sun, Carlos Gutiérrez, Karin Chien, Amy Hobby and Kelly Thomas, as well as this episode’s guests, Matt Stoller, Kaila Hier, Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh. And of course, a heartfelt thank you to our funders, Ford Foundation, Perspective Fund, and Color Congress. Until next time, I’m your host, Avril Speaks. Signing off.