No, no, Dustin, that's not the kind I'm talking about... Photograph: Carlo Allegri/Getty Images
British political writer and humorist Alan Coren once wrote an essay explaining that bestselling books were all about one of three subjects: golf, cats and Nazism. When a book of his collected works appeared he duly titled it Golfing For Cats. The cover featured a cat with a swastika armband wielding a four-iron.
The book sold well, and although I like to think it had more to do with the quality of his writing than the title or book jacket, the point he made was a good one. Formulas work, they can even work when they are cooked up in the most crassly cynical way. Nowhere is this truer than Hollywood, where if you want to win an Oscar, you need a sophisticated understanding of its tastes and timetables.
Take a look at the history of the Oscars over the past 25 years and you will begin to see that nearly all the winners in the really big categories (best picture, best director, best actor, best screenplay) share certain characteristics. To begin with, most of them have been released in or after September. The horribly banal reason for this is that these movies are fresher in voters' minds. Over the past 15 years, the only two movies to win best picture with a pre-September release have been Forrest Gump (1994) and The Silence of the Lambs (1991).
Oscar winners also tend to have period settings. Forrest Gump, which walked away with three Oscars, actually had several period settings. In the last 15 years, only three movies set in contemporary times have won for best picture (Million Dollar Baby, American Beauty and Silence of the Lambs). You might argue that The Lord of the Rings doesn't actually take place in the past, but it sure as hell doesn't take place in any recognisable version of the present either.
It also helps to have a high degree of pain in your movies. The Academy has a huge soft spot for disability and disease - anything from alcoholism to cancer - because this allows actors to show off. A Beautiful Mind (best picture 2001) was about schizophrenia. Rain Man (best picture, best actor 1988) put the spotlight on autism. The now almost forgotten Terms of Endearment, which won a staggering five Oscars in 1983, centred on cancer. The excellent Philadelphia (1993) saw Tom Hanks win best actor for his portrayal of an Aids victim. The following year, he also won best actor playing the eponymous Forrest Gump. OK, so Forrest wasn't actually sick, but you have to admit he wasn't all there. Equally, Raging Bull, for which Robert De Niro won best actor playing the deranged boxer Jake La Motta, may not actually have been about disease but it was definitely about pain.
Movies that manage to combine pain with a period setting often do almost as well as the appalling Terms of Endearment. The Pianist, Schindler's List, Sophie's Choice, Life Is Beautiful and The Killing Fields all concerned genocide and all were excellent movies. Between them, they garnered 16 nominations and won nine Oscars.
Of course, all the pain and period settings in the world won't help you unless you have serious money behind you. Studios pour huge amounts of cash into Oscar campaigns because Oscar wins translate into higher box office receipts, rental grosses and DVD sales.
So there you have it: money, pain and the past, with a post-September release. Oh, and it helps to cast Tom Hanks. Now go make a movie.
