And the winner is…

'To fiddle with Oscar time is

a delicate exercise, given the

intricacies of release schedules'

First date: Gwyneth Paltrow during her famously over-emotional Oscar acceptance in 1998. The Golden Globes, below, steal the limelight tonight, a month ahead of the Oscars. Photographs: AP

TONIGHT the pride of Hollywood will slip into party clothes and head for a televised annual awards bash to give and get their Golden Globes. Should it really be Oscars night?

For those who inhabit the movie world few topics have provoked more table talk lately than the timing of an Academy Awards show. What is supposed to be the film year's main event has, for some, begun to feel like an afterthought. Among the whispered words: "Show fatigue." A six-month slog toward the Oscars typically begins in September, as films like The King's Speech and Black Swan woo the media at festivals in Telluride and Toronto. The focus soon shifts to New York, with another festival, and the debut of pictures like this year's critical darling, The Social Network.

Next up are October nominations for the Gotham Independent Film Awards, which this time favoured Winter's Bone. Then come Governors Awards from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which also grants the Oscars; 10-best lists from critics and the American Film Institute; and an endless round of screenings, mixers and prize ceremonies that escalate into the full-blown galas of Hollywood's own guilds and professional organisations.

On 26 February, many of the same stars will troop to the beach in Santa Monica for the Film Independent Spirit Awards. Finally, the next day, the hardiest among them will brush off a tuxedo or wear a brave smile and yet another gown to grace an Oscar show whose winners will already be apparent to anyone following the awards season madness. "You don't want to be trailing every other show," says Bill Mechanic, a film producer who, with Adam Shankman, staged last year's Oscar ceremony. He has become a voice in favour of a change that might bump the Academy Awards up by a month or so.

Advocates of the current schedule argue that the elaborate awards-show calendar actually builds anticipation for the Oscars, gives the Academy's nearly 6,000 voters time to watch films, and lets studios use the prize season to market movies that might otherwise disappear from screens in the blink of an eye. "I can't see the benefit to the rank-and-file Academy members, let alone the public," of a shorter season, says Tony Angellotti, an Academy member and an awards strategist who this year is helping to run campaigns for Disney's animated films, including Toy Story 3.

Angellotti believes viewers already find it hard to catch up with the movies by an awards date that six years ago was moved to its present slot from late March. "Chop off a month of film-going, and what happens in their interest?" Angellotti asks.

• This article was first published in the Scotland on Sunday on January 16, 2011 In a brief statement last autumn the Academy said it would not significantly change the date of its awards until at least the 2012 show but added that it was evaluating the "advantages and challenges" of a possible change in the following years.

Speaking privately, a number of Academy insiders describe an intense internal debate that has raged for at least four years around the timing of the show that brings the non-profit Academy more than $76 million in revenue annually and accounts for almost all of its income.

At one point, according to various members, DreamWorks Animation's chief executive Jeffrey Katzenberg led a charge to reinvigorate the show by moving it in front of the Globes. Larry Mark and Bill Condon, debriefed after they produced a generally successful 2009 Oscar broadcast, later suggested changes that led to the doubling of the best-picture nominees and noted that a shorter season would have more snap. Then Mechanic, following last year's broadcast, pointed to a problem that would have been unthinkable only a few years before: some of the most impressive stars, worn out by a long awards season, did not want to bother with the Oscars.

If the awards were moved up, Mechanic said, you might not "sit there and think, ‘I know who's going to win.'" But to fiddle with Oscar time is a delicate exercise, given the intricacies of release schedules and the pressures of a promotional industry that has grown around film awards since the high budget battle of 1999 between DreamWorks SKG's Saving Private Ryan and Miramax's Shakespeare In Love. "There would have to be an entire rethinking of how you campaign and how you market these movies," says Lynne Segall, the publisher of MMC Entertainment. Already, she says, spending on awards advertising has dropped in the years since the Academy shortened its season by moving to February.

"Shortening the window limits the choices distributors have in rolling films out," says Steve Gilula, a president of Fox Searchlight Pictures, which last year showed up late with Crazy Heart, and snatched a best actor award for Jeff Bridges. Studios, however, do not get a vote in the deliberations of a deeply conservative film Academy. As recently as last year, according to members who spoke on condition of anonymity, the group considered landing its show in the mid-January slot that has been good to the Globes and its network, NBC.

But that plan was shelved, probably permanently, as Academy governors came to believe that the intricacies of Oscar voting would allow a mid-January show only if the movie world were put on a "fiscal year" that might end in, say, November. Even to stage the Oscars on a late January date, the Academy might have to replace its current voting system - paper ballots sent by post - with the kind of online system already used by some other groups. But the security risks are enormous: What if WikiLeaks decides, just for sport, to crack the Oscars?

Compressing the various galas into January might create something new. Larry Mark suggests that Hollywood "ponder the idea some day of having all of the awards ceremonies take place over a two-week period, culminating in the Oscars - a sort of Awards Festival."

In any case, the pressure for change is considerable - and will build if this year's Oscar ceremony, hosted by pair of young movie insiders, Anne Hathaway and James Franco, doesn't bring enough viewers.

"It's smart to move it up," says Tom Pollock, a film producer and Academy member. The sprawling awards process, he explains, "has diminished the television appeal of the awards show."

Pollock was an executive producer of Up In The Air, a best-picture nominee that won no Oscars last year, after having ground through the process, from Telluride and Toronto to the bitter end. "In retrospect, it peaked earlier than it should have," Pollock says of his film. Then again, he notes, it lost to The Hurt Locker, a picture that started its long trek in Toronto - in 2008, a full year earlier. v

The 68th Golden Globes Live, Sky Movies Premiere, tonight, 1am. The Academy Awards, 27 February