Oscar bait success of summer blockbusters like "Jaws" and "Star Wars" (both of which had also been nominated for Best Picture), independent filmmakers refined Carr's methods of exploiting the Oscars. Merchant Ivory, who produced lavish costume dramas, often based on novels by Henry James or E. M. Forster, began to time their releases to align with the awards season. Their 1985 adaptation of Forster's "A Room with a View" won three of the eight Oscars it was nominated for. By 1991 the modern film-release calendar, in which studios released the movies they had the highest Oscar hopes for in autumn and December,
Mrs. Ted Bliss to the character of Mrs. Bliss. Walter Goodman, a television critic for "The New York Times", mentions in his review that "[the book] may not be Stanley Elkin's best, but it is a smart, generous, melancholy, funny, even elegiac work by a prodigious practitioner". "Publishers Weekly" writes that "Elkin is at his best here, blessed with the gift of one-liner insight and a definite, if reluctantly exercised, ability to tug on a reader's heartstrings". Elkin won the 1995 National Book Critics Circle Award in the fiction category for the novel. The book was nominated along with "Independence Day" (by Richard