To appreciate why the Ocars are rubbish, one first has to understand exactly what the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is. AMPAS is a circle of peers - producers, directors, actors, cinematographers, screenwriters, publicists - all of whom owe the pits and troughs of their careers to the very organizations they are due to vote upon every January. It would be naive to think that each of the 6000 odd members of the Academy does not have a shed full of axes to grind. Could there possibly be a more monstrous collective ego than that of a Hollywood performing arts league, exhibitionists by trade, prima donnas of legend, each one of them driven by unfathomable depths of loyalty, malice and enduring memory? He who was fired by Paramount studios in the 50s is not going to forget the past any quicker than did those who refused to clap for McCarthy-era collaborator Elia Kazan in 1999. "Their dirty little secret is that they take too much into account when filling out ballots," wrote veteran Hollywood business reporter Nikki Finke in Salon.com in February 2002. “The Oscars are their payback time, pure and simple."
One can't simply join this most prestigious party of Hollywood lawgivers - you have to be invited. Invites, according to the Academy's own criteria, are "limited to those who have achieved distinction" in the film industry. In other words, you can't be young and vital - you have to have been around long enough for all to consider your best work behind you. Consequently, when you have a dizzyingly innovative idea such as Pulp Fiction running against a sentimental old boot like Forest Gump, it's a one-horse race - there are no prizes for guessing which film scored the votes of Mickey Rooney, Buddy Hackett, Shirley Temple and the thousands of other Academy members whose hearing aids farted with distortion at the opening bars of Miserilou.
Nikki Finke claims to have spoken to Academy members who admitted to voting in 1998 despite not having seen Saving Private Ryan at all - the poor old buzzards knew they wouldn't hack the violence, so gave the film a wide berth. The same queasy Academy tummies, claims Finke, dashed the chances of Edward Norton despite his perfectly brutal portrayal of a racist skinhead in 1997s American History X. As one screenwriter told The Daily Standard's Jonathon V. Last in 2003, "I liken Academy voters to an audience of grandparents at an elementary school play - they like Oliver and You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown."
Onto this stage of derelict judges, ancient grudges and petty jealousies writ large, the studios present an annual performance so corrupt and fraudulent that it's…well, worthy of an Oscar. Publicity-driven Oscar campaigns are nothing new - the studios schedule their big releases with Oscar time in mind, and every holiday season the Hollywood trade magazines like Variety flutter with "For Your Consideration" ads, designed to 'remind' Academy voters of particular nominees. But a new era in Academy Award skulduggery began, it seems, with the 71st Academy Awards in 1998, the end of an Oscar race that set new standards in sleaze.
From the moment the soldiers hit the beach in Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, it was clear to everyone that the Dreamworks war epic was a "lock" for Best Picture of 1997. Over at rival Miramax, studio boss Harvey Weinstein had other ideas. No sooner had the crowd sobered up from the previous year's awards when Weinstein hired the services of Warren Cowan, Dick Guttman, Gerry Pam and Murray Weissman, four veteran Hollywood publicists who remained on the Miramax payroll for the next 12 months, their job to wine and dine Academy members to the virtues of 1997s two big Miramax contenders, Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful and a decidedly underwhelming Elizabethan comedy called Shakespeare In Love. Weinstein defended the appointments by claiming simply that the men were publicists and it was a studio's job to publicise its films. It didn't seem to matter that the publicists in question had been retired for decades and were themselves all members of the Academy.
When the British Shakespeare In Love director John Madden arrived in New York just prior to the awards, Miramax hosted a "Welcome to America" party in swanky Manhattan restaurant Elaine's, the guest list flecked with Academy members in clear violation of a standing AMPAS canon that members not be serenaded by nominees. Then rumours began circulating of a smear campaign against Private Ryan, with several top Hollywood reporters complaining that Miramax spin-doctors were trying to influence them into giving Speilberg's film bad press. Tony Angellotti, one of the publicists named in the scandal, seemed to confirm the rumours in his own denial. "My job is to analyse," he told a reporter, "and if I said anything negative about Private Ryan or any other film, it was in the context of what someone else said."
It was an expensive campaign for Miramax (an estimated cost of US$16 million) but if the words "Academy Award-winning" are as valuable on an advertisement or rental box as everyone seems to agree they are, it was indeed an excellent investment - Shakespeare In Love shocked everyone by winning Best Film and being nominated for a record 13 awards. Life Is Beautiful, too, was a surprise success with seven nominations and three wins, and when an Oscar-clutching Benigni announced he felt he should "make love to everyone" in the audience, it may have been less of a joke than an expression of what Roberto thought would be his obligation - the Oscar lead-up had seen him dutifully grinning his way through intimate dinners with the likes of Kirk Douglas, Jack Lemmon and Elizabeth Taylor, all influential Academy members and one-time clients of Miramax 'publicist' Warren Cowan.
The bar had been raised, and today all the big studios hire their own 'Oscar strategists' with multi-million dollar campaign funds to ensure that Academy decisions aren't left to chance or, worse, merit.
"Oscars have always been about more than 'pure' artistic merit,” says Lisa Schwarzbaum, movie critic for Entertainment Weekly. “With thousands of people voting, each with personal agendas and interests, what wins is inevitably a mix of merit, zeitgeist and odds. What's shifted in recent years is the degree to which the campaigning has become visible."
It has now reached the point where the studios don't consider it at all unsavoury to have bullied a nominee over the line - on the contrary, the flaks view it as a point of professional esteem, in much the same way as a legal defence team considers it an accomplishment to release an obvious killer back into the community.
When Tilda Swinton failed to get nominated in 2002 for her outstanding perfromance in The Deep End, Nancy Utley, Fox Searchlight's president of marketing, seemed utterly oblivious to the cynical core of her own agenda when questioned by Amy Wallace of Los Angeles Magazine. "I honestly have a very clear conscience about this," she declared. "We attacked it (the Academy) with incredibly strategic thinking…This was as complete, as expensive, and as aggressive as the campaigns for Quills and Boys Don't Cry, which I personally oversaw."
Swinton herself was philosophical, according to The Deep End co-writer and director David Siegel. "It was much more important to the Fox publicity people than it was to her," he said. "She just didn't want to let them down."
Recently, the Academy has made very public but ultimately feeble attempts to clean up the increasingly dirty image of the Oscar campaign. Those published on the Academy’s website include the banning of nights out “specifically designed to promote a film or achievement for Academy Awards”, limits regarding studio contact with Academy members (“Telephone calls to verify a member’s address are permitted”) and austere restrictions on the weight of card and paper stock used as inserts for ‘screeners’ (DVDs and videos of films sent by studios to Academy members). The studios, naturally, have no trouble making a mockery of the Academy’s efforts. Last January, Michael Goldstein of the New York Daily News reported on the abuse of the right to hold private screenings for Academy members, claiming that the studios “lavish Oscar voters and key taste-makers with free screenings in New York, Los Angeles and even hideaways like Maui, Hawaii.” The studios, he claimed, were picking up the tab “for $5,000 a day hair stylists and $50,000 a day private jets so stars can look their best.”
Meanwhile, the Academy “diligently protects the reputation of the Oscars” in America’s courts. Last year, AMPAS successfully prevented a small-time bookie from registering the website oscarbetexchange.com, Lawyers for AMPAS, oblivious to the irony of their own words, arguing that “the integrity of the Academy Awards would be undermined if the public believed the Academy participated in or sponsored gambling on the results of the Oscars.”
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