Race for Oscars looks wide open this season

As the home stretch of the movie year arrives, Hollywood has rarely been more in need of a holiday pick-me-up.

Film and TV screenwriters are on strike after months of bitter, fruitless negotiations. And a fall movie season that was supposed to deliver both healthy box-office returns and a pack of Oscar contenders has fallen short on both counts.

That's why a lot is on the line as the holiday film season arrives. Hollywood is eager to restart a selling engine that stalled out around the middle of the summer with tepid performers like "The Invasion," and never got back on track. In addition, the Academy Awards race, which usually has produced one or two sure bets for Best Picture by now, is instead wide open.

The scramble for both commercial and Oscar gold will proceed on two fronts, with a handful of films seeking to prove themselves in both categories.

In the prestige department, producers and executives at studios' specialty arms say that this holiday season is more packed with award-seeking fare than usual. The slate includes not just big-name dramas like "American Gangster," which opened last week, but also several films with literary pedigrees ("The Kite Runner" and "Atonement") and the latest offerings from major filmmakers like Mike Nichols ("Charlie Wilson's War"), Joel and Ethan Coen ("No Country for Old Men") and Francis Ford Coppola ("Youth Without Youth").

"There definitely isn't a front-runner," says Miramax Films President Daniel Battsek of the awards race. "That's a good thing, and it also makes us that much twitchier." Miramax will release the Coen brothers picture domestically Friday.

The box-office race, meanwhile, includes DreamWorks Animation's recently released "Bee Movie," which Jerry Seinfeld labored over for four years, and Warner Bros.' sci-fi flick "I Am Legend," starring Will Smith living in a post-apocalyptic New York. Also on the fantasy front, there's New Line Cinema's $180 million computer-graphics-heavy "The Golden Compass," based on Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" fantasy novels, and "Beowulf," which uses performance-capture technology to recreate Angelina Jolie and other actors in a virtual world.

The drive to make these films click with audiences is especially intense after the industry's forgettable fall. Fueled by the private-equity financing that has poured into the movie business over the past couple of years, too many films were released over the past few months. This year, 53 films opened at 10 or more theaters in September and October, according to Media By Numbers LLC, a box-office tracking firm in Encino, Calif., compared with 43 in that period five years ago.

The unhappy result: The crowded field led to shorter time frames for films to germinate in the marketplace and build buzz, preventing most movies from catching on in the public discussion. Even films that generated positive press or good word-of-mouth on the fall festival circuit -- like Sean Penn's "Into the Wild" and George Clooney's "Michael Clayton" -- fared only marginally.

Meanwhile, movies tackling issues surrounding the political climate and the Iraq war failed to gain traction or widespread box-office success. Writer-director Paul Haggis' "In the Valley of Elah," starring Tommy Lee Jones and Charlize Theron, has brought in only $6.6 million in ticket sales since it opened Sept. 14. In contrast, Haggis' 2005 Oscar-winning film, "Crash," took in $44.3 million in its first six weeks. In its first two weeks, New Line Cinema's "Rendition," with Reese Witherspoon and Jake Gyllenhaal, raked in about $8.3 million. Other movies, including touted projects like "Elizabeth: The Golden Age" and "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" have done poorly.

The bad news is that the holiday release schedule offers precious little relief from these market dynamics. Paramount Vantage had such a full slate this fall that it opted to shift the U.S. release of the Coen brothers' "No Country for Old Men" to Miramax, which co-financed the film, rather than give up a chance to open in autumn. The Coen thriller opens Friday opposite the Robert Redford-directed "Lions for Lambs" and the comedy "Fred Claus."

Despite the crowded landscape, studios usually can't resist slotting a movie into the last few weeks of the year if they think they've got the goods to compete in the Oscar race. "Atonement," a drama that stars Keira Knightley and is based on the Ian McEwan novel, could have been ready to release this past spring. But Focus Features decided to release the movie in December, in part because the studio "felt it could feature well in award season," says Tim Bevan, one of the film's producers.

Paramount Vantage President John Lesher says that with so many so-called prestige movies opening, nothing is a sure bet. "It's survival of the fittest," he says.