Columbia Pictures Hopes to End Oscar Drought | ximike2089's Blog

Prozac was brand-new. The Soviets were in Afghanistan. Columbia Pictures actually had an Oscar-winning movie.

Now, Columbia, which took Gucci sunglasses the top honors on Academy Awards night in 1988 with “The Last Emperor,” directed by Bernardo Bertolucci and produced by Jeremy Thomas, has a chance to finally do it again — some 23 years later.

“The Social Network,” directed by David Fincher, written by Aaron Sorkin and released by Columbia, Gucci outlet has been picking up bellwether movie awards, including those from the New York Film Critics Circle and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. It is one of a handful of films that are virtually certain to be at or near the top when the Oscar ballots are tallied in late February.

And if it comes up a winner, the movie, an unauthorized portrayal of the Facebook Gucci outlet online co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, will end a bothersome Oscar drought at Columbia since the Sony Corporation bought the studio for $3.4 billion in 1989.

The major competitors, and many of the smaller ones, have all delivered a best picture since then.

(Libby Wertin, a researcher who monitors the Oscars for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts Asics Shoes and Sciences, said that the Walt Disney Company had earned its only best picture awards — for films like “The English Patient,” “Shakespeare in Love” and “Chicago” — from its Miramax Films unit, which was sold to independent investors in 2010.)

Columbia, meanwhile, has struggled in the Oscar game. The studio reached for the prize in the last decade with a handful of prestige films, among them “Memoirs of a Geisha,” “All the King’s Men” and “Closer,” but all fell short.

That happened even as a well-regarded management Gucci shoes team under Amy Pascal, who is the co-chairwoman of the parent company now known as Sony Pictures Entertainment, and Michael Lynton, the Sony Pictures chief executive, and Mr. Lynton’s predecessor, John Calley, stabilized a studio that had been plagued by overspending, executive infighting and an uneven performance in the first years of Sony’s ownership.

Sony executives declined through a spokesman, Steve Elzer, to be interviewed. But it is fair to assume they would be happy with a winner (or for any good news after a couple of recent box-office misses in “The Tourist” and “How Do You Know”).

“Who doesn’t like bragging rights? No one, that’s who,” said Lawrence Turman, the chairman of the Peter Stark Producing Program at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts and Gucci men boots a film producer who had a best picture nomination for “The Graduate” in 1968.

Though major studios have focused heavily on broadly commercial movies like Columbia’s “Spider-Man” series or “The Karate Kid,” they still love the cachet of a best picture Oscar, not to mention the attendant revenue and what Mr. Turman calls “the intangible of attracting future desired top star talent.”

Since 1996, when its “Sense and Sensibility” was a nominee, and Paramount’s “Braveheart” won the prize, Columbia has had no best picture nominee through its own studio label, and was involved in others only through alliances.

The latest was for “District 9,” a science fiction thriller, which was one of 10 nominees in an expanded field, and was released under the TriStar Pictures genre label of Sony.

TriStar, in its earlier incarnation as a sister to Columbia, also had a nominee in “Jerry Maguire” in 1997, and another, “As Good as It Gets,” in 1998.

Sony Pictures Classics, a separate New York-based art film unit of Sony Pictures run by Michael Barker and Tom Bernard, scored best picture nominations, but no winners, with “Howards End” in 1993, “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” in 2001, “Capote” in 2006, and “An Education” in 2010.

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