Conventional wisdom says that if you want to launch an Oscar juggernaut, it’s best to debut the film in the year’s final months. After all, that’s when so much awards voting occurs. Your movie can be fresh in people’s minds. This phenomenon means that Hollywood and indie studios have loaded up the year’s final three months with adult dramas eager for awards season glory. In recent years, Best Picture winners like “Everything Everywhere All at Once” and “Oppenheimer” opened in the first seven months of the year. These titles provide a sharp rebuke to the idea that only motion pictures in the final weeks of a given year can become Oscar titans. However, these 2020s titles aren’t the first to subvert release date norms for Best Picture nominees. In the mid-2000s, a new staple of the Best Picture Oscar category emerged. That staple would be best described as the summertime indie movie sensation.
In the first years of the 21st century, the restricted number of Best Picture slots (five) and the dominance of the major studios at the Oscars limited the number of indie movies that could break into the Best Picture category. Only Miramax could reliably break into the Best Picture space without significant studio money in the pre-A24/Neon days. If a pre-holiday season Best Picture nominee emerged in the 21st century, it was typically a big major studio release like “Seabiscuit” or “Erin Brockovich.” Of course, movies with major studio financing had the financial stamina to stay on people’s radars for an entire year.
Then, the 79th Academy Awards occurred, and the 2006 Sundance sensation “Little Miss Sunshine” scored a Best Picture nomination. Distributed by Searchlight Pictures (sister company to 20th Century Studios), the film still had a lot more money than much smaller indie releases would ever see. Still, “Little Miss Sunshine” was produced entirely outside the traditional Hollywood system – Searchlight had purchased it after a buzzy Sundance premiere – and it was much smaller than other then-recent, pre-holiday season Best Picture nominees. A new precedent had emerged for indie crowdpleasers to translate summertime box office success into Oscar glory.Kathryn Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker” debuted in theaters three years later over the final week of June 2009. That’s far from an ideal time to launch a potential awards season heavyweight. However, its early release allowed the film to cement itself as a critical darling outside the crowded fall festival scene. A new status quo was cemented when “The Hurt Locker” won Best Picture at the 82nd Academy Awards. Clearly, “Little Miss Sunshine” was no anomaly; summertime indies could become massive Oscar players. This feat was extra impressive because “The Hurt Locker” hailed from Summit Entertainment, a very tiny, relatively new indie label. All bets were off regarding when or where the next Oscar phenomenon would debut.
The peak moment for summertime indies in the Best Picture category arrived at the 83rd Academy Awards, just one year after “The Hurt Locker” dominated this domain. Both “Winter’s Bone” and “The Kids Are All Right” secured Best Picture nods after their respective summertime runs. Coupled with summertime blockbusters “Toy Story 3” and “Inception” also becoming Best Picture nominees, six of the ten Best Picture nominees at the 83rd Academy Awards were released before October 2010. The holiday season’s monopoly on housing Best Picture nominees was crumbling, which seemed to be even truer over the next two years, as summertime indies “Midnight in Paris” and “Beasts of the Southern Wild” both secured Best Picture nominations.
In the years that immediately followed, summertime indies somewhat decreased in prominence in the Best Picture category. Box office struggles for big Sundance acquisitions meant to be the next “Little Miss Sunshine” (see: “Me, Earl, and the Dying Girl” and “Patti Cake$“) helped mightily to ensure that summertime indies had a tougher time sticking around in the pop culture conversation all year long. Plus, the fluctuating number of Best Picture nominees for much of the 2010s – such as only eight nominees being recognized at the 88th and 91st Academy Awards – limited the films’ opportunities for recognition. It’s no surprise that the peak moment for summertime indies in the Best Picture category came when it was guaranteed to have ten nominees.
However, even after 2012, summertime indies like “Boyhood” and “Hell or High Water” still made it into the Best Picture race. Strangely, this type of Best Picture nominee is experiencing a mini-comeback in the 2020s, thanks to projects like “CODA” and “Past Lives.” Meanwhile, big studio releases that scored Best Picture nods released before September, like “Get Out” and “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” followed in the footsteps of “Little Miss Sunshine” and “The Hurt Locker.” Those 21st-century Oscar juggernauts proved that tiny movies could debut in the summer and retain enough momentum to be awarded darlings months later. Why not take a chance on dropping bigger features with Warner Bros./Sony/Universal resources at unorthodox points of the year?Given the historical precedent for summertime indie titles breaking into the Best Picture Oscar race – not to mention 2020s titles like “CODA” and “Past Lives” bringing us all back to the days of 2009/2010 – it’s worth asking whether or not any summer 2024 indies could become Best Picture material. The most likely contender at this stage is “Sing Sing,” a new directorial effort from Greg Kwedar. For one thing, it hails from A24, a studio whose 2023 release “Past Lives,” received two Oscar nominations including Best Picture. So, do not underestimate A24’s awards strategists. Plus, “Sing Sing” leading man Colman Domingo scored his first-ever Oscar acting nomination (for “Rustin“) earlier this year. Because he’s now on the Academy’s radar, maybe the rising tide of Domingo will lift “Sing Sing” to new Oscar heights.
As for other potential summer 2024 indie Best Picture contenders, “Kinds of Kindness” is probably too aggressive and divisive to mimic the streak of Oscar nominations that greeted the last two Yorgos Lanthimos movies. Perhaps Sony Pictures Classics will push “Kneecap” in a big way in the holiday season after its buzzy Sundance premiere. Who knows – maybe the June Squibb charmer “Thelma” even has a shot. The Oscar possibilities for these and other summer 2024 indies are much greater than they would have been two decades ago, thanks to a streak of summertime indie Oscar darlings from years past. Only time will tell who in the future continues this trend begun by “Little Miss Sunshine” and “The Hurt Locker.”
Which summer indie films have a shot at an Oscar nomination this year? Please let us know in the comments section below or on our Twitter account.
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