To Award or Not to Award Is Not the Question

We are at that time of the year in the film ecosystem where the award season is truly reaching fever pitch. I’m watching so many films, which is great! Screenings galore! 🚀🚀🚀

This morning the Golden Globes dropped their nominations. A couple weeks ago the Gothams handed out their winners. The Indie Spirits shined a light with the nominations on many films outside the mainstream studio system. The IDA awards were last Saturday. There’s the National Board of Review, AFI best of year list, and countless critics awards. It is a lot. On a group call for last Friday there was a focus on awards and the pluses and minuses. I found myself kinda fired up. So here are the three things for me to say about all this.

ONE: Ultimately it all gets centered around the main cheese, the Academy Awards. It is the most public facing and it is set up as the pinnacle of our industry and craft. There are lavish campaigns, endless trays of tiny foods handed out on...er...trays, celebrities doing Q and As, hands are shook, swag here and there and whatever else you can dream up. Marty Supreme cereal boxes have been on display and I sat through one of the best Q&As as Nancy Meyers quizzed Joachim Trier about Sentimental Value.

It is important to ground awards season in one core element that actually makes it lovely.

You see films.

A lot of them.

You see films in theaters, really nice ones and tiny ones too.

You meet the filmmakers, you share love for their work, your own work, and all our love of cinema.

We spend most of the year working on projects and hustling, and as the fall kicks in and winter comes (even in LA, it does come) it feels great to be dragged out to see people, connect, and be part of the community. I like seeing people’s films then running into them at someone else’s screening and being able to tap them on the shoulder and share in person how their work has impacted me.

Inherently awards have value towards one’s career and even to the exposure of the film in its distribution cycle. It is a validation of many years of work.

It is good vibes.

They matter.

TWO: The next thing to say is it is not a meritocracy. No awards judging and voting process is built in a similar or necessarily fair way. Sometimes they feel almost deliberately unfair. Let’s not forget that the Academy Awards were founded by the studios to improve PR and deflect creatives in Hollywood from unionizing, literally started to lead filmmakers away from advocating for themselves and their work!

“I found that the best way to handle [moviemakers] was to hang medals all over them. If I got them cups and awards, they’d kill themselves to produce what I wanted. That’s why the Academy Award was created,” Louis B. Mayer

It is also an expensive process, the cost is not say ten thousand dollars. It is not simply paying the submission fee or uploading a film to the Academy portal. It is everything around it. You have to schedule screenings, run e-blasts, book venues, manage RSVPs, hunt down voters, and hire publicists or strategists or consultants. It is a full campaign. As IndieWire recently pointed out, the number of eligible documentary films this year sits at two hundred and one. How is the documentary branch of the Academy realistically going to watch all of those films, half of those films, a quarter of those films, especially when they do not receive the screeners until the fall. You are not competing on merit alone. You are competing for attention inside a window that is impossibly crowded.

So you spend money to increase your odds. And then the question becomes: should there be some sort of campaign finance reform in this space. People are fired up about this. Because when a studio or streamer can outspend everyone else, that advantage is meaningful. It is not hypothetical. There is a reason some campaigns cost millions, especially on the narrative side. There is a reason a company like NEON spent eighteen million on the Anora campaign for Best Picture. Money creates presence. It creates access. It creates repetition. It creates the impression of inevitability. I’m not saying they shouldn’t do this, it’s their business decision, there are many pluses to why they do it. And for sure are the major studios not spending more money on their campaigns? The fact that an indie studio, NEON, with a film like Anora or a film like Parasite can win Best Picture is awesome.

But even if reform sounds appealing, how do you do it? How do you police it? How do you verify spending? And do the organizations actually want to enforce limitations? Because you have to remember that a whole ecosystem has built itself around awards season. Publicists, marketers, strategists, event producers, festival programmers, projectionists, screening venues, caterers, restaurants, drivers, photographers, even Substackers with email lists can be apart of this. These are not scammers. They are people whose livelihoods exist because there was a demand for this industry. The system is not simply a machine built for studios. It is a machine built for everyone who services this world. It runs from early summer until February, year after year. It continues to grow. The workers in this ecosystem deserve to work.

So is campaign finance reform possible? Maybe. But would it ever be perfectly fair? Probably not. People will always find creative ways around rules. That does not mean we should not try to improve the system. But I also think the energy cannot only go toward reforming awards, which brings me to...

THREE: The bigger problem is that NonDē filmmakers do not have a viable alternative. They do not have a path outside of awards that feels equally valuable to elevate their work, to elevate their standing in the ecosystem. They do not have an audience pathway that feels like an actual option better than winning awards.

Right now, many filmmakers push to qualify their films simply because they believe that doing so gives them exposure. And yes, it gives you exposure. That exposure is mostly industry facing. You are not reaching the general public until you get to the night of the awards itself if you are in the running. You are reaching the people who already vote, or work in the system, or attend screenings because it is part of their job. Even something like Sundance is industry facing. The disconnect is significant.

Imagine instead if filmmakers had access to meaningful alternatives. Imagine if the money spent four walling for a qualifying run was spent on an impact campaign that reached three or four times the number of people. Imagine if those nine months of the year that are not crammed with award hopefuls were reclaimed by NonDē filmmakers because audiences had been cultivated to show up then. Screens would be available. Competition for time slots would ease. Filmmakers could build momentum without standing next to a Netflix/WB/Disney release.

If filmmakers had a real path to reach audiences, they could choose it. They could choose impact, community, connection, education, and presence in people’s lives. They could choose screenings that matter instead of screenings that only tick a box. They could focus their resources on being seen by the world, not just the industry. Right now, they cannot. There is only one road that feels like it leads anywhere.

So the goal is not to eliminate awards or pretend they have no value. The goal is to build enough alternative paths that filmmakers finally have a choice. Because the absence of choice is what keeps this system frozen in place. Give people a real path to success outside of awards and many will take it.

It will be healthier for filmmakers.

It will be healthier for audiences.

It will create an ecosystem where a film’s life is not dictated by a three month window and a very expensive game.

Give filmmakers something else to choose.

At the end of the day, none of this is about tearing awards down. It is about widening the frame. If the only meaningful pathway for a NonDē filmmaker is to enter an expensive, crowded, structurally uneven race, then of course everyone will keep running toward the same finish line. But if we build real alternatives, audience pathways that carry weight, that create momentum, that give films life outside a three-month window then filmmakers will finally have an actual choice. And that choice is the thing that keeps the ecosystem healthy. Awards can still matter. They can still inspire. But they should not be the only yellow brick road that leads to the wizard. A healthier, more vibrant film culture emerges when filmmakers can choose different routes to connection, to sustainability, to visibility, and to impact.

Give them more than one path, and the whole system becomes more humane, more interesting, and more alive.