Peter Kujawksi has been around Focus Features for all 20 years of the company’s existence. When Focus started as the new kid on the indie block around the turn of the century, he was “answering phones and making coffee” as the executive assistant to then-chairman James Schamus. Today, he runs the company as its chairman.
In the intervening two decades, Focus has always aimed to make “movies that matter,” Kujawski says, and an impressive 14 of them have notched best picture Oscar nominations, including The Pianist, Lost in Translation, Brokeback Mountain, Atonement, Milk, A Serious Man, The Kids Are All Right, Dallas Buyers Club, The Theory of Everything, Darkest Hour, Phantom Thread, BlacKkKlansman and Promising Young Woman. Each time, however, another company’s film has taken home the Academy’s top prize.
But on Sunday night, Kujawski believes, that will finally change. During a call on Tuesday morning, he insisted that, contrary to the widespread assumption that the best picture contest has come down to Apple’s CODA and Netflix’s The Power of the Dog, the two films that have dominated the precursor awards, “It’s a three-horse race,” with Focus’ Belfast completing the triangle. “There is gonna be a real surprise.”
Kujawski, a member of the Academy, says, “They are totally their own organization — it has nothing to do with any of the other organizations in any real way.” And he believes that Belfast is ideally suited for the Academy’s preferential ballot used to determine the best picture Oscar winner. “There’s a need, of course, to be at the absolute top of the cinematic craft — the cinematic artistry of a movie has to be there — but that’s not it,” he explains. “There also has to be an emotional connection, in a real way, to an audience.”
He continues, “This one has always felt different because there is something that is universally connecting with people, and you see it in the fact that the movie has been playing in theaters nonstop for five months around the world. A black-and-white movie about a young boy in Northern Ireland is the third highest-grossing movie of the best picture Oscar nominees, behind only two mainstream commercial blockbuster movies [Dune and West Side Story]?! That doesn’t just happen. We are the lucky beneficiaries of a movie that is connecting with people in that way. And I think that in the world of the preferential ballot, and in the world of an Academy that does feel a sort of sense of obligation and mandate to find a movie that you can hold up and say ‘Hey world, this is what we, as a business, are capable of,’ we have a real shot.”
He emphasizes, “The bottom line is it’s a three-horse race right now, and Belfast is the complete package, so I think it’s more than ‘Don’t count us out.’ I truly believe that there is going to be a real surprise for people who put too much faith in those precursor awards, come Oscar night.”
Source: Hollywood
