It was the awards season that looked too good to be true. And so, indeed, it proved. Over the past few weeks, three of the most eagerly anticipated films scheduled for release in coming months have had their release dates abruptly moved back, thereby ruling them out of the running for the 2014 Oscars.
Audiences will now have to wait until later next year for their first look at George Clooney's second world war art heist caper The Monuments Men, as well as Nicole Kidman as Grace Kelly in biopic Grace of Monaco and Steve Carell as reclusive philanthropist-turned-killer John du Pont in Foxcatcher.
Reasons and theories for the delays have abounded, with Clooney and Foxcatcher director Bennett Miller citing late-running post-production, and the director of Grace of Monaco going public over his editing spat with super-producer Harvey Weinstein.
But writing in the Hollywood Reporter this week, awards pundit Scott Feinberg fuelled suspicion that high-calibre contenders were "dropping like flies" precisely because it was shaping up to be such a top-quality year. "Some distributors," he wrote, "would rather hold their films until the next cycle in the hope they will stand a better chance of getting noticed."
And with the likes of Gravity and 12 Years a Slave coming out of Venice and Toronto so heavily tipped for glory, it is hard to blame studios for seeking a more level playing field.
The common factor among the three exiting titles is their real-life origins. But that all are based on fact does not make them unusual among the year's Oscar contenders, of which a good 50% take their cues from real life – including Captain Phillips, The Fifth Estate, Saving Mr Banks, 12 Years a Slave, American Hustle, The Wolf of Wall Street, The Dallas Buyers Club, The Invisible Woman, The Butler, Rush and Philomena.
For such films, the odds of converting probable nominations into solid awards is also higher than for their fictional counterparts. While audiences may not be quite so keen – as the disappointing box office for Diana and The Fifth Estate suggest – the industry likes to confer its top honours on movies that appear to in turn bolster cinema's credibility.
Guy Lodge, who writes for awards site In Contention, says that 60% of best actor and actress Oscar winners in the last decade have won for biopics, compared with 20% the previous decade.
Other than the self-perpetuating favour of awards bodies, why the surge in big screen stories that open with the words "based on a true story"? One industry insider ascribes it to the death of the indie sector, which nourished original stories, and whose best practitioners have largely migrated to TV. "What happens now is that films are made by committee, so when executives are searching around the new material they reach for the past."
With blockbusters, this means more sequels. If you are chasing awards gold, you opt for the best-selling nonfiction book or – yet cheaper – magazine article.
But what the success of Argo and Lincoln last year and The King's Speech and The Social Network in 2011 have spawned is such a glut of "based on real life" glory-chasing stories that the trio of delayed films will at least try their luck in a less saturated market.
And those who are left are rumoured to be turning to underhand methods to hobble their competitors.
A report last week suggested studios are hiring academics to act as "history assassins" to cast aspersion on rival studios' movies. One Harvard professor says he was paid $10,000 (£6,200) by an Oscar marketing consultant to spot factual errors that would then be seeded out to influential blogs.
Alex von Tunzelmann, a historian who writes a weekly column rating the accuracy of films based on true events, said: "It's got too cloak and dagger this year. You start wondering what the Oscars are about when it comes to this very intense, brutal lobbying. Surely what people care about is the best film, not the one with the best campaign?"
There is an upside of course: the more films are worried about being flamed, the more they will heed the facts. "And as any history teacher who's sat through Braveheart will know, that's something to welcome."
Reports suggest punters are also increasingly interested in accuracy – in part because of the rise of smartphone use to check facts after (or even during) a screening, and because media interest has grown in tandem with the awards dominance of such movies.
Articles questioning just how heroic Captain Phillips really was, or whether or not PL Travers really hated cartoon penguins as much as Saving Mr Banks suggests, have done the rounds over recent weeks.
The US release of The Butler – based on the account of a real-life White House flunky – prompted a confetti of cuttings in which official presidential biographers carped about anachronisms and overstatement.
Even Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave, based on the memoir of Solomon Northup, who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in 1841, has not proved immune. Although McQueen's film is strenuously faithful to the book – and even tones down the drama – some have suggested the ghostwriter to whom Northup originally spoke may have amplified the horrors in the service of anti-slavery propaganda.
Such attacks look unlikely to dent its apparently unstoppable momentum. They could even benefit the film: to quibble over the extent of abuse meted out by deep south slavers may look less like valid critique than churlish nitpicking.
For Lodge, too, the pre-eminence of that film – and deep space saga Gravity – also has much to do with why other Oscar hopefuls have chosen to opt out.
"Perhaps if 12 Years a Slave and Gravity hadn't emerged from the September festival run with such deafening, oxygen-consuming buzz, a greater range of films might envision a path to awards glory.
"Of the major films moving to 2014, I suspect only Foxcatcher – for which expectations remain high – has done so to give itself a better shot at Oscar glory. Others are looking to avoid the 'Oscar-bait' label, so as to avoid disappointment or embarrassment if and when they turn out to be something else."
