The holidays are here, Oscar voters. What are you going to watch?
At this point in the calendar, the answer could almost be “everything” – but maybe not everywhere, and definitely not all at once. The Academy Screening Room, the members-only portal where studios can place their films to be viewed by voters, has 178 films as of the beginning of Christmas week, including every major Best Picture contender except for a pair of three-hour epics only recently unveiled, Damien Chazelle’s “Babylon” and James Cameron’s “Avatar: The Way of Water.”
Those films, which beg to be seen on the largest and loudest screen possible, have yet to be added to the Academy Screening Room, a placement that costs $20,000 (albeit with a discount available to lower-budget productions).