For Your Consideration

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This article is about the English phrase. For the 2006 film, see For Your Consideration (film).

For Your Consideration is a heading frequently used in advertisements in entertainment trade publications such as Variety and The Hollywood Reporter. They are specifically directed towards members of groups in the entertainment industry, most commonly the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which annually presents the Academy Awards celebrating the best in motion pictures, or the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences which presents the Primetime Emmy Awards for television.

Each year, the major movie studios, and to a lesser extent their affiliated television studios and the television networks, spend large sums of money on For Your Consideration ads extolling the alleged virtues of their films or programs released over the previous year. While it is unclear where or when the practice originated, it appears to have been popularized by Miramax, which rose from relative obscurity during the 1990s to become one of the most prestigious studios, at least of that decade. Many of its films, including The English Patient and Shakespeare in Love, won significant numbers of Academy Awards, even though many of those seemed to be little-known among the general public until just before the awards ceremony. For Your Consideration ads were widely credited with Miramax's awards successes in the mid- to late-1990s.

Not surprisingly, then, the quantity of such ads has increased dramatically, as major firms vie to win the top awards, hoping that the associated publicity will result in more viewers and greater revenues. Indeed, most of the films expected to be "Oscar-worthy" are released in the last few months of the year, occasionally opening in limited release just before the end of the year and opening wide in January. This generally ensures that these films are still in movie theatres as awards-related publicity peaks.

As might be expected, these ads have recently begun appearing online at websites popular with voting members of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. Movie buffs are now archiving and tagging these online Oscar ads so they'll be available for future study and commentary.