With a morale-boosting Golden Globe win under its belt for foreign-language pic, United Artists' "No Man's Land" is back in the trenches, gunning for an Oscar nom with one of the slowest blossoming campaigns this side of the 100 Years' War.
The film, Bosnia's official Oscar entry, debuted Dec. 7 in Los Angeles and New York, then expanded to six more markets Dec. 21. There it's been ever since, with an occasionally freshened ad campaign, laying low to avoid an armada of year-end glamour projects and monster hits. Only now, in the home stretch to Oscar nominations, is UA going on the offensive.
"The whole strategy was to be expanding more at the time of the Academy Award nominations," says UA marketing veepee Dennis O'Connor. "All the competition has already expanded. We're letting (the movie) sit in all these markets, and we're kind of piling on the accolades."
Even before the Globe win -- the Lion's first big prize since 1995's "Leaving Las Vegas" -- MGM and UA had reason for optimism about the pic, a satire of just about everyone in the Balkan war of the 1990s. Film has landed on a number of 2001 top-10 lists and nabbed the L.A. Film Critics' foreign picture award.
Of course, any Oscar push is complicated by the category's unusual nomination process, which requires a few hundred voters to see a large majority of the candidate films in an arduous process that ends Monday. But UA is hoping its slow build-up gives "No Man's Land" a chance to win the war.
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