Paramount Gives Transformers 3 Some Oscar Love

Deadline reports that Paramount Pictures has "decided to finance a big TV buy in voter-centric Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco to promote its summer blockbuster Transformers: Dark of the Moon." The planned TV ad is below. Transformers 3 was nominated for three Oscars in the Sound Editing, Sound Mixing and Visual Effects categories. Winning an Oscar is sort of like running for office as often the studios support TV and print campaigns to support their movies in the various categories and make Academy voters aware of the movie's nomination. Like any popularity contest, familiarity often trumps excellence which can be a detriment to something like DOTM where most of the voters tend to be of the baby boom (or older) generation.

The choice to support DOTM is a bit interesting considering Paramount's Hugo (with 11 nominations total) is competing against TF3 in all three categories. Deadline theorizes the move is in part a show of support to Michael Bay, Steven Spielberg and the movie's other producers. From Deadline:

Although the individual peer groups made the nominations, everyone in the Academy gets to vote for the final award. ”As you know the Academy is comprised of many branches representing the various disciplines in the filmmaking arena. Because not everyone may be an expert in sound or visual effects, we hope that this spot will encourage voters to carefully consider their choices and take into consideration the craftsmanship of each category when voting,” the spokesman said. “This is the culmination of years of hard work creating cinematic sounds and images that are now iconic — we wanted a form of Academy outreach that did that work justice and we simply felt that to see and hear it was very important.”

It’s definitely rare that a studio will put lay out big TV ad bucks specifically for below-the-line craft categories (some people don’t even want the Acad to keep them on the main show). It’s certainly true that the Academy at large is probably not as sophisticated when it comes to judging the merits of sound and effects, so this primer from Paramount is a novel approach to educate them.