“Gods and Monsters” (1998)
Oscar History: Picked up three nominations — Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actor (Ian McKellen) and Best Supporting Actress (Lynn Redgrave), and won one, when Bill Condon, also the film’s director, took home the screenplay award at the 71st ceremony.
There are films that loom large in Sundance Oscar lore, but perhaps by its nature as a melancholic, low-key period drama, Bill Condon’s “Gods and Monsters” isn’t really one of them. It was significantly outshone at the 1998 festival itself by the more youthful, spiky likes of “Buffalo 66,” “High Art” and “Pi“— all of which represent the idea of the “Sundance movie” far more than Condon’s elegiac, out-of-competition biopic of “Frankenstein” director James Whale. But sometimes the tactic of having a film like this premiere at the festival pays off, and though it never became a box-office hit, “Gods and Monsters” does earn itself the distinction of netting Sir Ian McKellen his only Best Actor nomination though he was beaten out by Roberto Benigni for “Life is Beautiful.” (And yes, we did a double-take at that fact too but it’s true: McKellen has never won an Oscar, and his only other nomination was Supporting Actor, for “The Lord of the Rings“.)
“You Can Count On Me” (2000)
Oscar History: Two nominations at the 73rd Academy Awards in early 2001 — Best Actress for Laura Linney and Best Original Screenplay for writer/director Kenneth Lonergan, though neither won.
Satisfyingly, after his masterful second film “Margaret” was mostly ignored, tomorrow is likely to see Kenneth Lonergan’s “Manchester By The Sea” become one of the most successful Sundance-to-Oscars transitions ever, with at least five nods looking to be locked up. It’s a great comeback, but not entirely new territory for playwright-turned-director Lonergan, with his debut film “You Can Count On Me” having picked up two nods back in the day. Like ‘Manchester,’ it’s a wrenching small-town East Coast family melodrama full of warmth, humor and humanity, in this case focusing on the reunion between single mother Sammy (Laura Linney) and her drifter brother Terry (Mark Ruffalo). Picked up by Paramount Classics after it won the Grand Jury Prize (shared with “Girlfight”), it didn’t break out of the arthouse ghetto in the way that ‘Manchester’ has, but performed healthily, and was rewarded with nods for Linney and the script, though neither won, and Ruffalo was sadly overlooked.
“In The Bedroom” (2001)
Oscar History: No wins, but 5 nominations in major categories — Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, Best Actor (Tom Wilkinson), Best Actress (Sissy Spacek) and Best Supporting Actress (Marisa Tomei) — made Todd Field‘s film one of the biggest players at the 74th Oscars in 2002.
With a $43.4m take, Todd Field’s excoriating suburban grief and revenge film is, along with “Napoleon Dynamite” and “Little Miss Sunshine,” one of the higher-grossing Sundance films of the 2000s, and while we’re hardly talking Marvel money here, that is pretty remarkable given how complex, tragic and deeply unsettling a film it is. It was also the most successful Sundance film of the ’00s until ‘Precious‘ in terms of Oscar nominations, and that’s perhaps easier to understand as raw, performance-driven drama typically plays well with the Academy, for whom actors have always composed the largest voting block. The intimate but devastatingly powerful story of an older couple coping with the violent death of their son, the film got an initial leg-up when Wilkinson and Spacek won the festival’s Jury Prize for acting. And now it is kind of a case study for the type of small movie for which Sundance can really make a difference: it’s easy to envisage an alternate timeline where this is regarded as one of those underseen gems that no one’s ever heard of, and not one of the best films of the dawning new century.
“Hustle & Flow” (2005)
Oscar History: One win, with Three 6 Mafia taking Best Original Song, and a nomination for Terrence Howard as Best Actor too.
There are certain things we think of as a Sundance movie, and as an Oscar movie, and props to Craig Brewer for upending the expectations on both fronts with his breakthrough feature “Hustle & Flow.” Telling the story of a Memphis pimp (Terrence Howard, in a part that made him a star) who attempts a hip-hop career, Brewer’s second feature, which had been financed almost in its entirety by John Singleton, had a southern-fried authenticity and visceral power that overcame some of its more trope-y moments, and was one of the biggest popular hits at the 2005 festival. Paramount Classics picked it up (branding it under MTV Films) and it became a modest hit that summer, but far more expected were its two Oscars nods (with Howard given a boost thanks to his supporting turn in Best Picture winner “Crash.”) He lost to Philip Seymour Hoffman, but Three 6 Mafia won for their “It’s Hard Out Here For A Pimp” song, prompting host Jon Stewart to deadpan “For those of you keeping score at home, Martin Scorsese, zero, Three 6 Mafia, one.”
“Little Miss Sunshine” (2006)
Oscar History: At the 2007 Oscars, the film won two awards — Best Original Screenplay for future Pixar and “Star Wars: the Force Awakens” writer Michael Arndt, and Best Supporting Actor for Alan Arkin, with Abigail Breslin being beaten to the punch for Best Supporting Actress by Jennifer Hudson in “Dreamgirls.”
It is of course reductive and unfair to the well-made and well-intentioned “Little Miss Sunshine” that it’s become almost a byword for the bittersweet dysfunctional family dramedy that is, along with the coming of age story, kind of the festival’s punchline — “Little Miss Sundance,” if you will. But it can’t be denied that the success of Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton‘s film, at the festival and then at the Academy Awards, is a kind of demarcation point in the perception of Sundance as an Oscar proving ground: our current conception of Sundance, and the “Sundance Movie” is very much a product of this unassuming film’s perhaps disproportionate success. And that success feels almost preordained: the day after its rapturous premiere, the film sparked a bidding war among the very studios that had passed on it beforehand, with Fox Searchlight setting a new Sundance acquisition record (a precedent that somewhat bit them in the ass last year with “The Birth of a Nation“) by forking out $10.5m for it. On this occasion, it was money well spent: the movie went on to garner nearly $60m at the domestic box office, and $100m worldwide, as well as its two Oscars.