How to Win an Oscar—or Go Broke Trying

Awards season, an annual circus of consultants and events, is awash in money. Nearly everyone involved seems to tolerate this at best. So why does Hollywood keep doing it? JOY PRESS looks for answers

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A crowd swarms outside the grand Hotel Excelsior, stretching all the way down to the Palazzo del Cinema, where Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein is about to have its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival. Inside the hotel, del Toro sits on a low chair engulfed by well-wishers who place drinks in front of him like sacred offerings. Hours later—after the movie has screened, receiving a standing ovation that lasts more than 13 minutes—I spot the filmmaker once again. Leaning heavily on a cane, del Toro makes his way up the dock, where a water taxi will whisk him away as festival attendees cheer.

Later that night I overhear someone say, “Frankenstein has officially entered the awards chat.”

That’s one of the very reasons studios send their movies to Venice, where a single ride on a private water taxi can cost as much as a meal at Le Bernardin. It’s the quickest way to put your movie on the radar of Academy Awards voters. Frankenstein was just one of Netflix’s Oscar hopes to premiere there in 2025, along with Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly and Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite. But other streamers and studios were just as eager to join. New movies from auteurs Yorgos Lanthimos, Luca Guadagnino, and Park Chan-wook also launched there this year, and superstars like Julia Roberts, Jude Law, Colman Domingo, and Cate Blanchett all walked the red carpet.

Festivals like Venice are a highly effective way of reaching the Oscar electorate, given that just over 20 percent of Academy members are now located outside the United States. So studios seeking gold statuettes send their contenders on a grueling marathon of global film festivals: After the Floating City, there’s Toronto, São Paulo, and Stockholm.