Karina on SpoutBlog

I think that people are looking at Che not as a film, but as a indie miniseries. It’s four hours long, in two parts, and is all in Spanish. They overlook the fact that it had a very successful screening run, despite it’s massive runtime, and look at it only as a VOD property, or as some sort of artistic folly.

And maybe it is a folly. A more awards friendly strategy would have been to put out only part one in 2008 and part two (if you produced it at all) in 2009. An arthouse Lord of the Rings.

…[But] the new art house is your house and the sooner the business realities of film reflect this, the better off we’ll all be.

Web video pioneer Kent Nichols, who with partner Douglas Sarine is currently writing/directing the remake of Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, blogs a refrain that’s been floating around in somewhat less concrete form for awhile: that the Academy’s total snubbing of Che, particularly its failure to nominate Benicio Del Toro for Best Actor, is a sign of bias against (if not a deliberate effort to punish IFC and Soderbergh for) the film’s non-traditional, quick-to-VOD release strategy.

This is one of a number of pieces I read over the weekend which essentially make the point that audiences are moving in one direction, and the Academy is moving in another. The biggest evidence of this trend is the fact that a number of Oscar-nominated films recently pushed into platform release by their indie arm distributors have failed to see the expected post-nomination box office bump, whilst “snubbed” films like Revolutionary Road are doing kind of okay.