The Oscar Death Race
In honor of the Oscars this Sunday, I figured I would throwback to early 2020— where film fans rejoiced at Parasite’s historic Oscar Best Picture victory (and moments before Covid-19 descended us into chaos). Leading up to the awards ceremony, I was frantically watching movies in preparation, as I was in the midst of the most ambitious film-viewing journey I had ever been on: The Oscar Death Race.
What is the Oscar Death Race?
Simply put, it’s watching every Oscar nominated film before that year’s awards ceremony, across all categories. In 2020 (where films released in 2019 were in competition), there were 53 films nominated for the awards.
In any given year, over 5% of Academy members don’t even watch every Best Picture nominee. How many members watch the nominees in every category, and how much dedication would it take for an average filmgoer to do the same? Considering streamers had a much smaller presence a few years ago, and I had no access to screeners, it became quite complex.
Previous Attempts
I casually attempted the Oscar Death Race starting in 2014 and 2015, and got far both times. My university would screen the short films along with some of the trickier documentaries/foreign films on campus, so I came within 10 movies of completion each year. However, once I came to the conclusion that some films would be entirely inaccessible, I stopped the challenges short.
2018 was the year I really dove into the challenge. I realized that the smartest way to tackle seeing the sheer number of nominated films was to start as early as possible, eyeing the circuit and getting the jump on movies while they were still in theaters. Once the nominees were announced, I was in good shape and ready to tackle those I had left— especially during overnight shifts working at my college dorm’s front desk. 3 AM viewings of many beloved classics like: The Boss Baby, Beauty and the Beast (remake), Ferdinand…etc.
My kryptonite were two international films, which had incredibly limited US distribution (and absolutely none in Colorado). Up until the last few days, I continued to scour the internet for any final hope that I could watch these two films, but to no avail. After I failed the challenge, I still went back to watch one of the films (Loveless, which was quite good), and plan to watch the other this year (The Insult).
The Winning Attempt
I’ll spare the anticipation and spoil that I did, indeed, find success in 2020. Just to emphasize, embarking on the Oscar Death Race is a year-long effort. Here was my general timeline through 2019 and into 2020:
January 2019 - April 2019: Watch a few of the indies and early releases— but generally this is the quietest part of the year for the subsequent year’s awards. I watched 0 movies during this time that were eventually nominated for the 2020 Oscars.
May 2019 - August 2019: Blockbuster season. Not many of the primary Oscar contenders are released this season, but films that end up being nominated in other categories are. Think visual efforts, sound design, etc. Not an intense time of year but good to keep up with new big releases. I watched 2 movies during this time that were eventually nominated (though a fair number were released in this window).
September 2019 - December 2019: Potential contenders begin to play at major festivals (i.e TIFF, Telluride, Venice, NYFF) and get theatrical releases. Keep an eye on which films are starting to get Oscar buzz, and it’s important to stay ahead and watch a lot of new releases during this time.
January 13, 2020: The Oscar nominees are announced! You get to see how you’ve done, and how many films you need to watch before the ceremony to complete the challenge. In my case, I had 31 out of 53 still to go (16 features and 15 short films). This is crunch time, and you have to track down all the screenings needed.
February 9, 2020: The Oscars! Luckily I completed the challenge 3 days prior so I didn’t have any last-second movie cramming, but it wasn’t until the beginning of February that I knew I was on track to finish watching all the nominees in time.
When it started getting down to the wire, I became obsessed with finishing the challenge. I’m a completionist by nature, and now I had a small first-job salary and was not afraid to use it! After months of shelling out for $20 rentals, going to theaters, watching movies I hated… there was one missing link: Corpus Christi.
Corpus Christi is a Polish film with a budget of $1.3 million, nominated for Best International Feature Film. By mid-January, I had zero luck finding any way to watch it, and started to get desperate. I had found a local Polish film festival that had taken place in Denver a few months prior and screened it, so I reached out to the event organizers to see if they still had a way I could access the film. No luck. I also reached out to a screening coordinator at my old university with the same result.
The only option I could find was a single screening taking place in New Haven, Connecticut— one day, one showing, and it was four days away. I realized it could work, considering I had a number of friends in New York City I could stay and spend time with during the trip. So, after sitting on the idea for a few hours, I impulsively booked a flight and scheduled a few last-minute days off of work.
The screening had great turnout and was attended almost exclusively older Polish folks. My heart sank when the trailers began, because they were all in Polish without subtitles. Did I just fly across the country to watch a film that will have no English subtitles?? But, luckily, once Corpus Christi began the subtitles appeared, and the film was pretty great. Fly-across-the-country-great? Still not sure about that, but I have no regrets.
Looking at the Data
Throughout the process, I kept pretty detailed accounts of how I watched each film, the time it took to find/ travel to various screenings, and spent money along the way. Here’s a peek into the spreadsheet I maintained for the year:
Maintaining this data was manual, as I had no knowledge of SQL at the time. I also could have used downloadable extracts from Letterboxd, where more film metadata and my watch history was already being captured.
I also manually built out a data visualization! This was my prized output of the entire process, and I’m incredibly glad I took the time to construct it.
To Wrap It Up
Would I ever do the Oscar Death Race again?
The simple answer: Probably not.
Too much time and too much effort for too many sub-par films I frankly wish I had skipped over. I’m incredibly glad I completed the challenge, but have since constructed my own film challenges that align with the types of films I want to be educating myself on. For example, last year I took on two challenges with just as much of a commitment (and hoping to share more on that soon!).
However, for anyone interested in completing the Oscar Death Race in the future, I hope this was helpful. My observation is that it’s become much more manageable in recent years due to streamers getting increasingly involved with buying awards circuit films and releasing them on their platforms for anyone to watch. In this regard, that’s a positive change, because I hope you can be spared the last minute cost and time of a flight (though it was an adventure).
In many ways, this project also represented one of the first times I took data collection on my hobbies seriously and created an actual product from the results. I want my upcoming projects to use this as a framework and expand on it. Excited to keep working and share more soon.
Thanks for reading!