A record was broken at the Oscars ceremony on Sunday night when all six of the major awards — best picture, best director, best actor, best actress, best supporting actor and best supporting actress — went to films produced by one studio. That studio wasn’t one of Hollywood’s players such as 20th Century Fox or Paramount or even one of the streaming giants such as Netflix or Apple TV +.
Rather the company that won biggest was a small independent studio, which over just more than a decade has quietly established itself as a home for smart, edgy, auteur-driven cinema. Embraced by youthful audiences across the globe, it has used the digital-era tools of social media to cleverly market its films.
The A24 is the utilitarian name of a motorway in Italy that links Rome and Teramo and holds a special place in film geek legend as the setting for many of the pioneering Italian neorealist films of the 1950s and 60s. It was on this motorway that Daniel Katz, head of film finance at Guggenheim Partners was driving in 2012 when he decided to establish a new independent film company with David Fenkel, head of indie company Oscilloscope and John Hodges, who worked for the production company Big Beach.
By 2013 the trio’s A24 had begun to make a modest name for itself as the producer and distributor of films by maverick US directors such as Harmony Korine (Spring Breakers), Sofia Coppola (The Bling Ring) and British indie veteran Sally Potter (Ginger & Rosa).
Over the next few years the company, with its distinctive light-spectrum flittering logo, established itself as home to a plethora of digital-era arthouse films that exposed the talents of boundary-pushing directors. They ranged from horror helmers Ari Aster (Hereditary) and Robert Eggers (The Witch, The Lighthouse); gritty neonoir newbies the Safdie Brothers (Good Time, Uncut Gems); feminist new-wave filmmakers Greta Gerwig (Ladybird) and Lulu Wang (The Farewell) to Greek postmodern surrealist Yorgos Lanthimos (The Lobster) — to name only a handful. In 2017 the company won three Oscars, including best picture for Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight. Upon the announcement of this year’s nominations it had a total of 49 to its name.
A24’s success has an obvious precursor in the 1990s’ domination of the independent film market by a now defunct and infamous film company called Miramax. Named after founders Harvey and Bob Weinstein’s parents — Miriam and Max — the company became a powerhouse player in Hollywood. It won dozens of Oscars and earned hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office for films by the first wave of indie US auteurs such as Quentin Tarantino and the Coen brothers, before the decades-long sexual abuses of Harvey Weinstein destroyed its reputation and left it a wreck and bankrupt.
Unlike Miramax, whose success was accompanied by the very public, visible and overbearing appearance of Harvey Weinstein on every awards podium, A24 has been notable for its founders’ aversion to publicity or credit-claiming cheers. None of the founders were to be seen in the spotlight when Everything Everywhere All At Once swept the awards with seven wins on Sunday night, nor when Brendan Fraser’s best-actor performance in Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale gave A24 its final top-six win.
Even in the wake of that record this week, the company has not made any of its executives available for interviews, releasing instead a statement that blandly acknowledged “it was a special night. We’re very proud and couldn’t be happier for the winners” — the kind of perfunctory and bare information notice you might expect to see on a billboard on the company’s namesake motorway.
In a period of postpandemic concern for the future of arthouse releases as mainstream studios bombard audiences with flashy superhero CGI (computer-generated image) epics and safe-bet franchise sequels, A24 is leading the way in showing that there is still space for films that push boundaries and expand the possibilities of the medium. Rather than follow the Miramax route of crowing, gloating and badmouthing competitors, A24’s quiet strategy of letting its films speak for themselves has offered a refreshing alternative to the outdated mogul egotism of Weinstein.
It must be remembered, though, that before Weinstein became a bully and flew too close to the sun, he allowed Miramax to succeed by putting its money where its mouth was and made decisions based on personal rather than popular taste. The question is whether A24, after its phenomenal Oscar success in 2023, will be able to avoid the pitfalls of its predecessor by continuing its commitment to left-of-field tastes and sensible financial discipline.
Its slate for the rest of the year looks like it won’t be steered into the dark waters of overblown studio misadventure just yet. The Australian horror film Talk to Me has just debuted to good reviews at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas and forthcoming A24 films include indie relationship drama director Nicole Holofcener’s You Hurt My Feelings; writer-director Celine Long’s Past Lives and company stalwart Ari Aster’s art-horror Beau is Afraid starring Joaquin Phoenix.
As Stephen Galloway, dean of Chapman University’s film school told the New York Times this week: “It’s really arthouse moviemaking that all of us probably thought was dead. And yet they’re proving it is not. You can guarantee at this point that they’re getting first dibs on any interesting, original, different non-mainstream screenplays.”
This year’s releases look set to reassure filmmakers, stars and audiences that thankfully for now all roads to arthouse, thinking people’s cinema in the US lead to A24.
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