anonymous1980 wrote:As for Get Out, the early release date is probably an advantage due to its un-Oscary genre. It worked for The Silence of the Lambs and Mad Max: Fury Road.
To be honest, contrary to popular wisdom, early release dates should start being thought of as an advantage PERIOD. Although way more nominees come from year-end releases, that's simply because more award-level movies are released at that point in the year. But there's really not much evidence that an early release date hinders a movie that's going to be in the conversation.
Since the Best Picture expansion, Mad Max: Fury Road, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Beasts of the Southern Wild, The Tree of Life, Midnight in Paris, Toy Story 3, Winter's Bone, Up, and The Hurt Locker have all made it into Best Picture with release dates in the first half of the year, and I don't think any ONE of those looked like a certain nominee upon release. The closest would probably be The Hurt Locker, but its face plant at the box office left its chances slightly in doubt...particularly given that the expansion to ten wasn't even announced until weeks later. And some of them -- like Beasts or Tree of Life -- seemed WAY out there in art-house land. But what all these disparate films had in common was the fact that they got out of the gate early and won fans quickly, and those fans stuck with those movies through year's end, while word of mouth spread and allowed the films to win new fans as the year went on.
The question is...are there a ton of examples of movies that got Oscar buzz from early in the year that DIDN'T get a Best Picture nomination? The best case I could find in recent years would be Ex Machina. (You could stretch this, of course, to include movies like Deadpool, Star Trek, Bridesmaids, and The Hangover, which got major Globe/Guild attention, but in all seriousness, did you REALLY think any of those would get a Best Picture nomination when they came out?)