How to Tell if a Movie Is Oscar Bait

From afar, it looked like prime Oscar bait: Tulip Fever boasts a grade-A prestige cast including Academy Award winners Alicia Vikander, Christoph Waltz, and Judi Dench. The off-camera talent includes a director (Justin Chadwick, Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom), writer (Tom Stoppard, Shakespeare in Love) and producers (Bob and Harvey Weinstein, supervillain sibling moguls responsible for some of the most aggressive Oscar campaigns in recent history) who have all featured heavily in awards conversation in years past. This was a long-developing hot-property project, with the kind of subject matter—a sweeping period romance and love-triangle costume drama set in the Netherlands at the height of tulip mania—that traditionally has Oscar voters salivating in Pavlovian response.

On paper, a movie of this sort appears destined to hoover up Academy gold. But Tulip Fever, which was released last week, currently has an even-mother-couldn't-love-it Rotten Tomatoes score of 8 percent, with journalists greeting the film with the kind of scorn they tend to reserve for social injustice or white supremacist presidents. And months in advance, there were signs of the kind of film Tulip Fever was actually going to be: a bona fide Oscar reject.

It's never encouraging when a film as outwardly promising as Tulip Fever arrives with zero buzz. Footage from the film screened at Cannes way back in May 2015, and previews have been held for the public since November 2014—plenty of time for the film to develop a healthy reputation. But Tulip Fever never had any of the positive word-of-mouth that Oscar-worthy movies often conjure months before release.

Release date changes aren't uncommon in modern cinema—but when a movie is delayed so many times, people assume something's up and sometimes begin to wonder if the film is just some kind of myth. Tulip Fever's release date was pushed back five times and released almost two years after it was originally due. That's not necessarily always a sign that panicking creatives are deliberating over a final cut that's actually watchable; Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret was held back for six years because of disputes between Lonergan and producers, eventually embraced as a masterpiece when it was eventually released in 2011. But in Tulip Fever's case, delays were connected to numerous test screenings of reworked versions of the film.

Aside from an early teaser image in 2015 and a trailer the following year, there was virtual radio silence in terms of marketing for Tulip Fever until last month, when The Weinstein Company finally landed on promoting its rather staid feature as Fifty Shades for history nerds. When a studio doesn't know how to market a film, it's usually because they lack confidence in what they're selling.

In the final third of the year, awards season kicks into gear with film festivals. In the past couple of weeks alone, studios have drummed up support for what they hope will be the latest Oscar contenders at festivals like Venice, Toronto and Telluride. The festival circuit is where the awards conversation truly begins—and Tulip Fever skipped it altogether.

Doing press for a movie is a chore—just ask Joaquin Phoenix, seen here silently smoking his way through a conference on the best movie he's ever made—but when awards might legitimately be up for grabs, you'll find cast and crew popping up everywhere to promote the work. Search hard for recent interviews with anyone responsible for Tulip Fever, and the most you're likely to find is the clip above of Christoph Waltz cheerfully admitting Harvey Weinstein more or less press-ganged him into doing the film.

Films released early in the year have won awards before: The Silence of the Lambs, which somewhat creepily opened on Valentine's Day 1991, went on to bag five Oscars. But rarely do studios release their Oscar contenders any earlier than the fall. Tulip Fever, released at the close of the 2017 summer movie season, may look like an awards contender—but it didn't realistically open in a position to compete.

In a post-truth, expert-hostile world, those behind shoddy movies would be wasting an opportunity not to dismiss professional critical opinion as fake news, insisting that cinemagoers spend their cash to find out how terrible a film is for themselves. David Ayer took that approach with Suicide Squad, and his DC dumpster fire took home $745 million worldwide. Harvey Weinstein penned a defense of Tulip Fever just prior to its release insisting it was made not for critics but real people—a clear indication that critics were about to tear his movie apart.

The final—and perhaps the clearest—indication that an upcoming movie is a dud is when critics aren't allowed to talk about a film beforehand. The studio knows they'll have nothing good to say, and even though critics arguably don't enjoy the type of repute they did in the time of Pauline Kael, aggregators like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic have an influence on what modern audiences choose to watch. The solution? Limit the impact of bad reviews by concealing them from the public until as late as possible. Tulip Fever reviews were embargoed until the afternoon of its day of release, to avoid bad buzz hitting ticket sales over the all-important opening weekend.