Still, he knew that it was so grim and depressing that people would only watch it if they had heard that it had been nominated for Oscars. He didn't expect much but loved the movie once he saw it. After a disastrous preview screening the studio brought in Allan Carr, a flamboyant producer (he was just coming off of Grease) and party-giver, as a consultant.
1978's The Deer Hunter was a game-changer. (This can mean an Award Snub.) And no matter how genuinely good these kind of films can be, depressing films about people suffering through tragedy, alienation, physical and mental disability and the horrors of the worst periods in human history don't often have the makings of a fun night out at the movies. Perhaps because the Academy can actually tell the difference between a good, honest movie and an Oscar Bait attempt, and partly because sometimes they respect the general publics opinion of a movie and will try to reflect that, there are many movies that are obviously gunning for awards that don't get nominated at all much less win. Furthermore, many Oscar Bait films are released around December or January (as a direct lead-in to the Academy Awards show in late February), so its easy to tell them apart from Summer Blockbusters. Hype Backlash and Hype Aversion play into that - the heavy campaigning to win an Oscar can be a big turn-off. The cost of all this is that most Oscar Bait movies dont do well at the box office. These aren't hard and fast rules you might see a Dramedy or Dark Comedy get a nomination, mostly because theres still room for suffering. It's rare for a comedy film to do well at the Oscars (in fact, one of the biggest cliches of this trope is a comedic actor starring in a heavy-handed drama to be Taken Seriously) sci-fi and horror don't do much better, and animated films were given their own categories once they flirted with pushing into the big leagues. There's also a big focus on mental illness or Inspirationally Disadvantaged characters. Such films are usually depressing dramas, Glurgey inspirational films, and examples of mans inhumanity to man an abnormally large proportion of Oscar Bait films have been set during The Holocaust. With fewer and fewer opportunities for "serious" films to get made and widely released at all since the Turn of the Millennium, what ones are made tend to focus on going for the gold and making their studios at least look like they care about True Art. While into the mid-'90s it was common for at least one major, mainstream hit to make it to the highest categories when it came to Oscar nominations, and sometimes they even won ( Rain Man and Forrest Gump were the highest-grossing films of their respective years, for instance), there was a growing focus from studios on targeting younger audiences with simpler Summer Blockbusters that didn't deal with realistic concerns of people over the age of 30. At the same time, the "serious" fare that did win those categories slowly became less popular. But as directors like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas hit their stride, they made beloved and well-received movies which were nevertheless seen as too lightweight to win the "important" categories (acting, direction, writing, and picture) if/when they were nominated. Before then, it was a pretty good bet that the most popular movies were also the best ones and thus the likely Oscar winners. The trend started in the 1980s in the wake of the emergence of the Summer Blockbuster, and as New Hollywood ended. 
They're called Oscar Bait, and the practice is also derisively known as "Oscarbation".
Typically, the results are more serious, depressing, or "artistic" films. Since around the early 1980s, instead of expecting an Oscar to be a natural side-effect of a film being exceptionally good, studios and producers have often tried to engineer certain films specifically to attract Oscar nominations. It enhances the studio's reputation and boosts future ticket sales. It would be naïve to think filmmakers always make movies according to whatever story they want to tell, and that a prestigious award like an Oscar, if they're lucky enough to be honored with one, is just icing on the cake.Īn Oscar is a big deal.
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