Going into Thanksgiving, how many movies can Oscar and BAFTA voters watch, including includes features, documentaries and international.
The long Thanksgiving weekend provides an opportunity for awards voters to get through the first pile of screeners — or in the case of the Academy Awards and BAFTA groups, scroll through their streaming room platforms. In multiple discussions with awards voters, it’s been interesting to note how few movies they’ve seen at this point in the year. Perhaps it’s related to the pandemic, and many of them returning to work and under the gun of deadlines, or maybe not hearing about anything that’s drummed up enough passion for them to seek it out. The in-person awards screenings in Los Angeles have been brimming especially for films like Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune” and most recently, Paul Schrader’s “The Card Counter,” both with star Oscar Isaac in attendance. But in this first year where DVDs are barred from being sent to Oscar and Bafta voters, will each film get enough eyes on it to make enough noise? In the case of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, we are two weeks away from the opening of the shortlist voting, where ten branches will whittle down their selections to 10 or 15 films. The categories are international feature, documentary feature, makeup and hairstyling, visual effects, animated short, documentary short, live action short, original score, original song, and for the first time, best sound, which will be cut down to 10. Last year 238 documentaries were submitted for the branch to consider, which crushed the previous record of 170 back in 2017. As of last Friday, there were 128 films uploaded, with a promise by the Academy of more to come by the end of Wednesday. So we shouldn’t expect the total number of entrants to surpass last year’s number, but it could be somewhat in the vicinity of the hefty 2017 number.
