CALIFORNIA, USA — If you’re aiming to watch all the Oscar movies ahead of the 2022 Academy Awards, you’ll need nearly a full 24 hours to watch all the nominees for Best Picture.
By nature of being up for Best Picture, it will likely be a nice journey through what the best movies of the past year had to offer, albeit an exhausting one. A rough estimate clocks the total run time around 23 hours and 16 minutes, give or take a few minutes for withstanding movie trailers at the theater or skipping the end credits.
The longest of the bunch is "Drive My Car," just a minute shy of being three hours long. Only two movies drop below the two-hour mark, with Kenneth Branagh's "Belfast" being the shortest affair at 1 hour and 38 minutes. "CODA" clocks in at 1 hour and 51 minutes.
It begs the question, what exactly is the appeal of some of these nearly three-hour movies? It's a subjective question, but experts have a few takes on the matter.
“Movie length is all about either ego or looking for the prestige factor, and that's why, in the Oscars, you're seeing so many goddamn long movies,” said Robin Russin, professor of theater and digital media at UC Riverside.
Long movies are not a new thing. People only need to look up movies like Spartacus, at 2 hours and 41 minutes, or Lawrence of Arabia at 3 hours and 42 minutes. In fact, a couple of decades ago, one of the nominees up for Best Director, Kenneth Branagh, made a 4 hour and 2-minute version of Hamlet.
Admittedly, the Oscar movies aren’t the only ones with long run times either. For Eric Melin, editor-in-chief of movie review website Scene Stealers, it’s a trend he’s noticed in a lot of mainstream movies as well.
“Mainstream films are getting really, really long. I think if we had to find a trend... I would say it's probably more to do with the fact that TV is so popular right now,” Melin said.
"Spider-Man: No Way Home" was a whopping 2 hours and 28 minutes, and "Avengers: Endgame" was just over three hours. Another notable name was Zack Snyder’s Justice League, clocking in at just over four hours.
Melin said some people are seeing these three-hour movies as three-episode arcs, not unlike what they see on TV.
“People are so used to the structure and the way that TV moves now because we're binging it, that I think movies are essentially just getting longer,” Melin said.
In some respects, it might just be a sign of the times as TV becomes more popular on streaming sites or it could also just be that a story takes that long to tell on screen.
Russin said that can be the case with some popular shows out of Korea, who don't appear to mind longer runtimes. He said that those shows have a standard model of being an hour and a half with 16 episodes in most series.
"It's like watching 16 features in a row that are all part of the same story. I think just the nature of nonlinear streaming, and in terms of going around the internet from one thing to the next, long movies drive us crazy now... but there have been plenty of long movies, especially ones that we're looking [at] for the Oscar," Russin said.
Whether or not someone has the stamina for these longer run times is a different story.
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