Every year at the Academy Awards, there are a few types of films that are bound to be nominated: the blockbusters that dominated the box office, the arthouse hopefuls and the little indies that could. This year is no exception – with films that range as wide in tone and scope as “Past Lives” to “Killers of the Flower Moon,” the extensive gamut of cinema is accurately represented. One result of such a wide breadth of cinema being nominated is that films that would otherwise fall under the public’s radar now gain far more attention than they would have.
As far as case studies go, there is no better example of how Academy nominations can help broaden a film’s exposure than Jonathan Glazer’s bleak, uncompromising Holocaust drama “The Zone of Interest,” which is nominated for five awards at this year’s Academy Awards, most prominently Best Picture and Best International Feature Film.
“The Zone of Interest” follows the family of Rudolf Höss, the Nazi commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, with nary a focus on the camp itself. Never seen and only heard, the atrocities committed by the Nazis take a backseat to the pastoral dream life the Höss family attempts to build for themselves. The family’s endeavor is filmed with cold, clinical detachment – in a move that likely netted him his Best Director nod, Glazer shot most of the film in a multi-cam setup, completely detaching any sense of authorial voice from the film’s visuals.
Compared to the other films nominated this year, “The Zone of Interest” is as unconventional as they come: an art film that, in both its aesthetic and narrative construction, refuses audiences an easy out. Though its construction is to be expected for those exposed to Glazer’s previous work, this film – despite its successful festival run, including winning the Grand Prix at last year’s Cannes Film Festival – seems almost designed to confirm general audiences’ worst fears about films that fall outside of commercial cinema’s traditions. And yet, those audiences that would normally run away from such a film now have a reason to at least give it a chance.
Films like “The Zone of Interest” often have a tragic distribution run where they’re thrown into arthouse theaters for a few weeks and then thrown onto streamers just as quickly. These filmmakers can use Academy Award nominations as an excuse to go wide (or as wide as their distributors can afford), hoping that such mainstream exposure can give them a seat at the cinematic table, which is often left to the studios that can afford to dominate the multiplexes. A studio like A24 who, despite their counter-cultural cache, do not have the capital to put films in theaters for as long as humanly possible, can use these nominations to gain a greater foothold in the theatrical space.
“The Zone of Interest,” was originally shunted away in limited release in December but was effectively granted space in the multiplexes thanks to its award nominations in January. The weekend after its Academy Award nominations, the box office jumped 141% from where it had originally stood, and while general audiences may have a hard time making heads or tails out of it, a film like “The Zone of Interest” deserves as many eyeballs on it as possible. Thanks to the Academy Awards, it will likely get them.
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES
