Not every 2024 Academy Awards nominee can walk away a winner, but this year's “Everyone Wins” Oscars goody bag will make sure that not a single Hollywood A-lister will go home empty handed.
“The bigger the award, the bigger the disappointment when you don’t win,” Lash Fary, founder of Distinctive Assets, the marketing agency behind this year's Oscars gift bags, told The Wall Street Journal in a recent interview.
“What if they didn’t walk away empty-handed?" Fary continued. "What if there was this consolation prize of sorts?”
This year's "consolation prize" is a goodie bag worth $178,410, according to Distinctive Assets, and features a slew of expensive gifts, including a three-night stay in Switzerland, a three-night stay at a private villa in St. Barts, and a seven-day holistic wellness retreat.
The gift bags are reserved for host Jimmy Kimmel and every nominee in the major acting and directing categories.
According to The Wall Street Journal, the Academy stopped offering nominees gift bags itself, citing the "upfront tax burden they placed on stars."
As Fary told the publication, the expensive gift bag items are "actually just offers," meaning brands provide "invitations for services, objects and experiences" that, unlike gift cards, are not taxable. It's up to the nominees to actually redeem the offers, and according to Fary no one has ever "come close" to redeeming every voucher that comes in a gift bag.
Not all of the more than 60 gifts are high-price items, either. According to the same The Wall Street Journal report, this year's gift bag also features a $9 case of soda, a $15 Rubik's Cube and $80 worth of black licorice.
Fary told The Wall Street Journal that he came up with idea to offer gift bag to prestigious nominees after he watched Better Midler go home empty-handed after the 1994 Emmy Awards.
“My experience with wealthy, famous people is that if they can get a deal, they want a deal,” Fary told the publication. “If they can do it for a fraction of the price or for free, then even better for them.”
According to Fary, Viola Davis used one of her Oscars gift bag offers to book a family vacation to Hawaii. Award-winning director Ron Howard also redeemed an offer to stay a luxury resort in Connecticut, and Melissa McCarthy used a voucher to commission a custom piece of artwork for her husband, Ben Falcone, for his birthday.
