Julia Roberts accepts the Golden Globe award for best actress
After all, in what now seems like a brilliant presaging of the November elections, in the last two years the Motion Picture Academy has had its ballots go missing, and the golden prize itself, the presidential seal of showbiz — Oscar — was heisted (the whole shipment turned up in a Dumpster). The parallels are sufficient to keep Academy Awards host Steve Martin vested in gags throughout the show (though as an astute comic, he will, I suspect, be sparing in milking this particular cow). But it will certainly give the vapid Stepford TV anchors on the Oscar red carpet something fresh to mangle.
But behind the jokes will be more truth than the funny lines suggest. We have all become familiar with the complaints about how Washington politicians have borrowed heavily from the entertainment world in recent years — the slick advertising, media-savvy makeovers, the cozying up to talk-show titans. But in truth, Hollywood has borrowed just as much, if not more, from the political process. And nowhere has this been more apparent than in the campaigning for the Academy Awards.
The reasons for this are quite simple: money and prestige. No matter how much money a film has made before mid-March, an Oscar inflates the return considerably. If a film is still in theaters, such as "Chocolat," the take grows exponentially if it wins a major prize. If the film is gearing up for video release, it will sell many more units with an "Academy Award winner" sticker on the box.
For the talent and technicians, the rewards can be both immediate and long-lasting. Actors, writers and directors can all double their rate the day after an Oscar win. Those who are skilled in behind-the-camera crafts rise to the top of the pay ladder. And for all winners, there is the indelible "Academy Award winner" appellation, a prefix or suffix that will adorn their résumé forever. Unlike the Grammys, which had to withdraw a statue from Milli Vanilli when it turned out that they didn't actually sing, no one has ever had an Oscar withdrawn when it turned out subsequently that they couldn't really act.
With such valuable prizes at stake, it is no surprise that the machinations to win an Oscar have become so sophisticated and tactical in nature. What's astonishing is that it took so long for the process to become so infused with the ways of Washington.
What was once a comparatively simple process marked by naïve hustling and obvious grandstanding has become every bit as Machiavellian as a stealth campaign to put a neophyte or ne'er-do-well in the White House.
There are two main areas in which the Washington mentality has invaded Hollywood. The campaign calendar and the campaign techniques.
THE PRIMARIES
There has always been an unofficial season that leads up to the Academy Awards. The declaration of the candidates, and then a sprinkling of lesser awards ceremonies that lead to the main event. But until the last few years, these other awards were seen as random occasions that jostled for our attention without any serious merit. But a convergence of interests has now placed shape and intent on those lesser trophies and elevated them into an inexorable guide of the Road to the Oscar House.
First and foremost is the famed Golden Globes. Though this venerable event has been around for some 50 years, it was not until about 10 years ago that it started to assume real significance. The show traditionally takes place on the third weekend in January, and by being the first major event in the calendar it has assumed the film industry role of the New Hampshire primary. It's the first major poll where the popularity of a film or actor can be tested.
Astute TV producer Dick Clark grasped the significance of this a few years ago, and took the Golden Globes from a struggling, haphazard show dwelling on the lower rungs of your cable box into a prime-time network TV special. And everyone plays along. Actors, writers and directors are shepherded to the ball by eager publicists who spin the awards to suit the results. A win is naturally a clear indication of the industry's mood. A loss is of no significance, because "it's only the Globes."
But is it really New Hampshire? Is this a fair indication of how 5,000 Academy members will vote? Not at all. This is less a primary than a straw poll or a caucus, and nothing as substantial as the views of a few good Iowans. For beneath the gilded veneer of its impressive name, the Golden Globes are really just the opinions of approximately 75 minor foreign journalists who are gloriously self-appointed. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association is a loose amalgam of print and TV stringers, usually from very small countries, who have been sent to Los Angeles to cover the glitz of show biz. English is sometimes the second but usually the third or fourth language for these reporters. And yet... because their predecessors were astute enough to name their trophy wisely (the Bronze Bauble or the Silver Spangle would not have done the job), their choices can have an enormous impact in giving an outsider the momentum to spring into serious Oscar consideration. With so few voting members choosing between five nominees in each category, it is mathematically possible for the personal taste of as few as 15 journalists to select the winner of a Golden Globe. That these scribes write for journals almost as esoteric as the Albanian Lawn-Mowers Gazette makes the process even more risible.
In political terms it would be as though the New Hampshire primary were voted on only by those foreign correspondents whose questions at presidential press conferences are so respected that CNN and MSNBC always cut to a commercial when they pipe up. They're barely covered by C-Span.
But the Globes are in the catbird seat in the Oscar calendar. Following the January Globes come a plethora of smaller primaries where Oscar hopefuls try to pick up delegates to take to the main event. These are mainly the awards handed out by a slew of guilds, unions and societies representing the various technicians. Inevitably these craft awards are given short shrift during the Academy Awards. While you use the Best Art Direction of Best Cinematography awards as a refrigerator or restroom moment, they are naturally very important to those who labor out of the spotlight to make the films we see.
So in recent years many of the guilds representing these crafts have instituted their own award ceremonies, where the indignity of a three-minute slot at the Oscars can be redressed by a three-hour ceremony dedicated to the chosen art. This of course is a noble undertaking, and gives the hardworking technicians their own night in the sun (if one may play with the solar schedule).
But of course these honorable awards also become part of the Oscar process, and it's another two-way street. To make these award events more glamorous, actors and directors suddenly turn up at the Cinematographers Ball as special honorees and presenters — and you've guessed it, many of these just happen to be Oscar hopefuls.
The result is a win-win situation. What would otherwise have been a modest event for members of the craft is thrust into a media spotlight by the attendance of stars. The stars get the coverage in the all-important trade press. And the stars also get brownie points for showing up from the technicians, many of whom are Academy members. In political terms, this is the equivalent of the Washington pol who treks around to every rubber chicken fund-raiser in Idaho and Alabama hoping to pick up delegates along the way.
In early March come the big major primaries, the equivalent of New York, California and Texas. This is when the heavy-hitting guilds in the major categories kick in with their awards. Two of these are not Johnny-come-latelies. The Directors Guild and the Writers Guild have each held separate award ceremonies for more than 50 years. But muscling in on the scene have been the newcomer Producers Guild and Screen Actors Guild, at 12 years and seven years, respectively. These guilds coordinate the dates of their award shows carefully to prevent clashes and to assist the Motion Picture Academy and the studios in the buildup to the Big Event.
There was one prospectively big newcomer to the primary stakes this year — an attempt, if you will, to create a film industry equivalent to Super Tuesday. The drawback in Oscar campaigning of all "primaries" that follow the Golden Globes is that they are all for specialized crafts. There is no other major ceremony that mirrors the across-the-board categories of the Academy Awards. Step forward the BRITISH Academy Awards!
For many years this event has languished on the entertainment calendar in an unenviable April slot — a month after the Oscars, when award show burnout is at its height. This didn't matter much in the past, because owing to the way American films used to be released internationally (i.e., nine months to a year after the U.S. release), the films being honored in the U.K. were invariably the previous year's films anyway. So if an Oscar ceremony was dominated by battles between "Forrest Gump" and "Pulp Fiction," the fact that one month later the British were giving out awards to the previous year's Oscar winner, "Schindler's List," was hardly a newsworthy event outside of the U.K.
But the international release patterns of movies have drastically changed in recent years. Films are released in most major territories within the same calendar year. The British Academy woke up to this fact and astutely moved their prestigious event from the doldrums of April into the prime campaign time of late February, when Academy Award ballots have arrived on the doormat of voters and are being mulled before voting.
The fact that this event is taken seriously by the industry is underscored by the fact that the film world's most notorious Oscar dodger, Woody Allen (who famously makes a point of never attending the Oscars however many times he is nominated), nonetheless made a big point of making an appearance to accept a British Academy Award. This was in 1993, when he won the Best Original Screenplay award for "Husbands And Wives." Admittedly his acceptance speech was by satellite from New York, but that is still considerably more gracious than anything he's ever done for the American Academy.
Alas, the impact of what might have become Super Sunday did not materialize this year. Though the event was well attended in the U.K., with several Oscar nominees such as Tom Hanks making the trek to London, Rupert Murdoch's Sky TV operation, which secured the worldwide TV rights, inexplicably failed to sell the show to an American network.
This will undoubtedly be rectified by next year, and the British Academy's bid to become a significant part of the Oscar primary season will resonate where it counts — on American TV screens, reaching those all-important Academy voters.
THE CAMPAIGNING
Just as the months of January through mid-March have become the film industry's primary season, Hollywood has emulated the spin-meisters of Washington in its campaign strategies.
The Hollywood marketing machines are not exactly primeval. The movie industry has always been about spinning fable and fantasy. But the primary objects of those campaigns have been the public. Money is honey in Hollywood, and putting people in the theaters has always been the first order of business. But pitching films, actors and technical crew to 5,000 persnickety Academy voters is a much trickier skill. This is a sophisticated, seasoned electorate that prides itself, just as New Hampshire voters do, on being canny enough to see through the phonies.
So how do the studios reach their prey? Well, even in the old, less sophisticated days, there was always a massive amount of advertising. The entertainment industry supports two daily publications, Daily Variety and the Hollywood Reporter, and during the awards season those publications literally bulge with ads. Lest they seem too eager, the adverts don't say crass things like "Vote For This Film." Perish the opportunistic thought. Instead they have the perennially coy line "For Your Consideration...."
If such ads appeared just once, the line might appear discreet and tasteful. But when the line is repeated in hundreds of ads it becomes as subtle as a Sunset Boulevard hooker in garish makeup and Vote-For-Me Pumps snaking her hips and pouting "For Your Consideration..." as a come-hither to passing British actors.
Of course, as with political spots on TV, the trouble is that everyone runs these full-page color ads, so they tend to cancel each other out. You can't not take out ads, because then you would be invisible. Like Alice In Wonderland, you have to take a huge number of ads just to stay where you are!
Where the real difference comes is in the subtle whispering campaigns, the delicate spinning and shading filtered out through the editorial pages. Take for example the skillful task being undertaken with Russell Crowe. Though performances in sandal-and-sword movies don't usually warrant Oscar consideration, there had been some early speculation that Crowe might be in the running. The cynical might scoff that Crowe's tunic in "Gladiator" was as much a consideration with female voters as Daniel Day-Lewis's loincloth had been in "Last of the Mohicans," but Crowe has earned his share of fans in recent years, especially after "The Insider." But Crowe has been his own worst enemy. He has a swagger that has had some journalists describing him as obnoxious and self-important. Not for him the self-effacing behavior of a Tom Hanks or Ed Harris. This was compounded by the tabloid-fed perception that he had wooed Meg Ryan away from her storybook Hollywood marriage to Dennis Quaid, then dumped her when he'd had his fun and/or the film had wrapped.
Well, it's hard to secure votes for a cad. The headline writers were already preparing their headlines of "Cadiator!" when suddenly the spin-meisters were in full session. A few weeks ago accounts surfaced that Russell was still an item with Meg Ryan and that the two would move in together (at least until after the Academy Awards). No sooner had the image of Russ the noble, loyal lover been spooned out than another story surfaced. Russell the Impaler was now Russell the Imperiled! An unknown adversary was threatening to kidnap Russell and do such terrible things to him that the FBI was called in to protect our hero! (Did anybody ask to see Dennis Quaid's phone records? Just a hunch...)
Now the spinners were in their element. Russell Crowe went from arrogant Aussie to endangered species (a prospective thespian version of the Lindbergh baby) in the space of two weeks. And since no one seems to have threatened Spanish heartthrob Javier Bardem or placed a voodoo hex on Marquis de Sade channeler Geoffrey Rush, Russell Crowe has owned the news cycle.
Whether this will influence Academy voters to vote for him is unsure. But it has certainly placed Crowe in the forefront of voters' minds at the crucial point when they vote. And that is a major part of the endeavor.
The Russell Crowe spin machine is just the tip of an immense industry iceberg. It is no coincidence that A&E recently aired a "Biography" about the real Erin Brockovich, or that a movie theater in L.A. decided to hold a retrospective of Albert Finney movies, or that Kate Hudson seems to have been on more magazine covers than any young actress nominee since... Goldie Hawn.
The Hollywood equivalents of James Carville and Mary Matalin — veteran press agents such as Pat Kingsley and Jerry Pam — have been toiling beneath the radar on behalf of their clients. And unlike their political counterparts, these skilled spinners rarely speak out publicly. They are the unseen strategists and operators who need the approval only of their clients.
The proof of their work comes on Oscar night when there will be no court of appeal or submission to the Supreme Court. The team of Price Waterhouse will rule with more accuracy than any bug-eyed Palm Beach official, and with more of the electorate's respect than that accorded the hell-bent determinator of Florida, Katherine Harris.
The real battle for each winner will be to keep the inaugural address known as the Acceptance Speech to the term limits prescribed by Oscar producer Gil Cates. Fortunately for us, not even Academy Award winners are as long-winded as politicians.