Gibson's Passion overshadows Oscars

By David Sillito
BBC arts correspondent in California

The Oscars ceremony is looming on Sunday, but the US appears to be far more interested in Mel Gibson's controversial film The Passion of the Christ, which opened there on Wednesday.

The Passion of The Christ has provoked huge interest

What happened to the Oscars?

It was supposed to have made them more exciting but bringing the Oscars forward a month appears to have had the opposite effect.

In the week leading up to them, American television appears to have almost forgotten about them - The Passion of the Christ has been getting all the attention.

The Oscars just hasn't been making it in to the running orders.

And while people queue round the block to The Passion the nominees for this year's best film have been experiencing a rather limp Oscar effect.

The boost to their box office takings has been $59m (£31m). Last year it was (dollars) $109m (£58m).

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Then there's the ceremony itself. March sunshine has been replaced with February floods in the week leading up to the event. The giant golden Oscar statues have been drenched. Pools of water were being brushed away.

And another sign that things have changed can be seen on Sunset Boulevard.

This is the drive to work for hundreds of Hollywood workers and it is normally festooned at this point in the campaign with enormous billboards supporting various Oscar-nominated movies. This year there is only a handful.

It's even had an effect on the number of movies in the cinemas. January is normally choked with good films vying for Oscar glory.

But bringing the Oscars forward a month has made it harder to use the old gambit of releasing films for a few days after Christmas and then using the Oscars' publicity to gradually widen the release.

The Oscars ceremony takes place on Sunday

The number of movies has fallen from 38 to 23.

Of course it's not all the fault of the Academy.

Two of the best picture nominees, Seabiscuit and Master and Commander, were released months ago.

The Oscar effect was always going to be smaller.

The front runner, The Return of the King, is such a behemoth that the Oscars could never have had much impact on its billion-dollar box office takings.

And no-one could have predicted that a subtitled religious movie would dominate the airwaves.

Director Gibson has accepted the film is violent

Indeed the only real measure of the Oscars will come on Oscar night itself.

If the audience ratings improve then this two year experiment will appear to have been a success.

The hope is that by cutting a month out of the campaign then the public won't have become jaded by too many awards shows in the run up to the big night.

There is also another consideration, DVDs.

This digital miracle has changed Hollywood's habits. They are now more lucrative than box office takings and are driving many of the changes in Hollywood.

The time between a film being shown in cinemas and it being released on DVD or video is shrinking.

Gibson's film has provoked protest as well as adulation

Celebrating the films of 2003, nearly three months into 2004 was beginning to make no sense.

The Oscar halo is being shone on DVD sales more than on box office takings.

Oscar is increasingly a trigger to go out and buy rather than go out and see.

February is always a grim month for the American box office - perhaps a better guide to the new early Oscars will be to see what effect it has in the video stores rather than the movie theatres.

And of course it can't be worse than last year with an Oscar ceremony during the war in Iraq.

Nominees may feel a bit more comfortable indulging in Hollywood glitz knowing that they are not appearing in between rolling news of tanks rolling through the Iraqi countryside.