Oscar Winning Product Placement at the movies - George Clooney in The Descendants

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At the Movies: Oscar-Nominated Product Placement

Posted by Abe Sauer on January 27, 2012 07:01 PM

Academy Award nominations were announced this week and everyone is angry, as usual.

When it comes to product placement, the list of nominees includes a few notable films, including George Clooney's latest star turn.

In the best picture category, three films featured very prominent placements, two of them framing the soft drink wars

Moneyball, the story of how math made its way into professional baseball, best actor nominee Brad Pitt and co-stars share screen-time with Pepsi logos. Impressive, but Pepsi has nothing on Coca-Cola's role in nominee The Help. The tale of brutal racism in 1960s Mississippi, The Help brings in a bottle of Coke to bridge the cultural gap on one scene, allowing a black maid and a white woman to find friendship.

Dysfunctional family film of the year, The Descendants, had Clooney fans raving. It was also a central marketing focus for the Hawaii's Kauai's St Regis Princeville Resort. From the resort's official marketing material:

"The St. Regis Princeville Resort serves as a beautiful backdrop for several scenes filmed for the highly-anticipated movie The Descendants, starring Academy Award® winner George Clooney and Shailene Woodley with the Oscar®-winning director Alexander Payne. The Descendants released on November 16, 2011, is based on the book with the same title by Kaui Hart Hemmings, screenplay by Alexander Payne and Nat Faxon & Jim Rash, is already winning critical acclaim from the likes of Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, The Wall Street Journal, Entertainment Weekly and more."

The St. Regis even set up a vanity URL — StRegisPrinceville.com/descendants — for those looking to stay where Clooney stayed.

The same resort starred in another top film of 2011, Adam Sandler's Just Go With It. That film, of course, was not nominated.

The last best film nominee to boast a little prominent product placement was in the animation category. And, no, it was not a Pixar film, the studio that saw its 2011 Cars 2 become the first Pixar film ever to be passed over by the Academy for a nomination.

Instead, Rango worked in a Pepto Bismol bottle for a laugh.