The Oscars are just around the corner, so now's as good a time as any to start amping yourself up by revisiting past highlights. And the show's producers, with help from 180LA, are making it easy to get a quick fix with the four new ads below, cut together by Oscar-winning editor Kirk Baxter.
The first, "And the Oscar Goes to," features a parade of stars—too many to name, though movie buffs might have a fun time trying to rattle them all off—doing their best victory dances. Their exuberance is pretty moving, even if it's plenty vain, too.
A second, "Holding Oscars," features the campaign's most poignant moment—one second of Robin Williams looking around in breathless gratitude, a genuine scene that makes the loss of such a talent sting all the more in hindsight.
The third spot, a multilingual Kumbaya "Everyone Speaks Oscar," can't help but be a bit corny. (Sure, movies are a universal language, sort of, but really, where would most of us be without subtitles?) Still, the Academy deserves a nod in the Best Lie category for trying to pretend Hollywood isn't a U.S.-dominated enterprise, and implying the winners are an ethnically diverse bunch—when in fact they're mostly white.
The fourth ad, a Valentine's spot featuring the likes of Matthew McConaughey and Tom Hanks kissing their wives at the show, is cute enough, set to the fairly obscure but anachronistically charming sounds of "Am I in Love" from 1952's Son of Paleface, performed by Bob Hope and Jane Russell.
For good measure, 180LA also commissioned a series of 15 posters featuring the Oscar statue alongside various artists interpretations of imagination (a popular theme in ads because it's hard to hate).
The results feature a number of nods to the award show's roots in the Art Deco era, but the standouts are really the weirder takes—like Hattie Stewart's leering, winking cartoon hearts, and Blastto's surrealist eyeball sculpture. Because if those aren't apt metaphors for America's unhealthy obsession with celebrity, what is?
CREDITS
Client: Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences
President: Cheryl Boone Isaacs
Chief Executive Officer: Dawn Hudson
Chief Marketing Officer: Christina Kounelias
Marketing Manager: Ford Oelman
Agency: 180LA
Chief Creative Officer: William Gelner
Creative Directors: Zac Ryder, Adam Groves
Copywriter: Christina Semak
Art Director: Karine Grigorian
Head of Production: Natasha Wellesley
Producer: Nili Zadok
Chief Marketing Officer: Stephen Larkin
Account Manager: Jessica DeLillo
Account Coordinator: Alexandra Conti
Planner: Jason Knight
Holding / Goes to / VDay
Editorial Company: Exile Edit
Editor: Nate Gross (Holding)
Editor: Will Butler (VDay; Goes to)
Executive Producer: Carol Lynn Weaver
Producer: Brittany Carson
Foreign Language
Editor: Dave Groseclose
Producer: Brian Scharwath
Color, Visual Effects, Finishing: The Mill, Los Angeles
Colorist: Adam Scott
Color Executive Producer: Thatcher Peterson
Color Producers: Natalie Westerfield, Antonio Hardy
Color Coordinator: Diane Valera
Lead 2-D Artist: Robin McGloin
2-D Artist: Scott Johnson
Art Department: Jeff Langlois, Laurence Konishi
Executive Producer: Sue Troyan
Visual Effects Producer: Kiana Bicoy
Visual Effects Coordinator: Jillian Lynes
Recording, Mix
Recording Studio: Eleven Sound
Mixer: Scott Burns
Assistant Mixer: AJ Murillo
Producer: Dawn Redmann
Executive Producer: Suzanne Hollingshead