There are several jobs at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences that any working stiff living outside of the 310 area code would kill to have. Leslie Unger’s isn’t one of them.
In her 7 1/2 years as publicity coordinator, she has listened to journalists whose requests for Oscar credentials have been rejected. She also is required on occasion to debate angry editors on the merits of their publication and to scramble after scatterbrained scribes who might have forgotten to file the required documents on time.
“I’ve seen a continual growth in the number of people who want to cover the event, and it hasn’t leveled off,” Unger said. “I think we’ve gotten applications from 580 outlets and, on any given application, there might be requests for credentials for several of their reporters and photographers. That encompasses photo agencies, daily newspapers, weekly magazines, monthly magazines, television, radio, Internet, you name it.
“We were able to accommodate access for 280 of those outlets, although virtually none of them are getting everything they requested.”
Although it might seem to invited guests, presenters and nominees that every cub reporter with a tape recorder has descended on the Shrine Auditorium this year, in fact only a precious few will be allowed to line the red carpet. Several dozen other journalists must observe the arrival procession from a distant perch in the bleachers, while still more are relegated to the press tent.
Everybody else is kindly invited to watch the proceedings, at home, on television.
“What we’re trying to accomplish, in terms of press coverage, is twofold,” she stressed. “One, in the arrivals area, we hope to bring people to the television coverage of the show. The other thing is to explain what this ceremony actually is: a news event that honors achievement.”
And, all along, we thought the press was there merely to report on the latest fashion atrocity committed by some misguided manikin, like Jennifer Lopez. “The whole idea of the Oscars is being lost,” lamented Robert Osborne, author of “70 Years of the Oscar: The Official History of the Academy Awards.” “One of the saddest things is that, now, when people dress up for the Oscars, it’s not about going to the event and talking about achievement. It’s about how they’re going to dress, so Joan Rivers doesn’t make a nasty comment about their gown.
“It’s about who’s going to wear the least amount of clothes. Celebrities know that the one with the most bizarre dress is the one who’s going to be in all the magazines.”
Osborne guessed that it was only four or five years ago when the most-asked question on the red carpet became, “Who designed your dress?” instead of the time-honored, “How are you feeling?” and “Have you written an acceptance speech?” When such new-media outlets as MTV and E! Entertainment discovered that their softball questions were every bit as valuable to a star’s publicist as the marginally less lame questions asked by reporters for mainstream outlets, it opened the floodgates to everyone.
This has led to a scenario, in which the arrival area has become a veritable Red Carpet of Babel, and the press tent overflows with reporters whose editorial missions often are at extreme cross-purposes to each other. Five years ago, for example, local radio oddity Piranha Man managed to confound Oscar winners with his unintelligible questions, while more focused reporters were shut out from the microphone.
“I used to go to the Oscars all the time, and they were always a media event … but they were controllable,” said Osborne, who, this year, will host a gala Oscar-watching party at New York’s Le Cirque 2000. “You could be in the press room and everyone had a typewriter. Everyone had their own space, and they were ladies and gentlemen.
“Now, it’s like the paparazzi in Cannes.”
Still, someone has to stand guard against the Philistines, and that task generally falls to Unger and her staff.
“Now, we’re expected to provide programming — as opposed to news — for all of the television and some of the Web-based outlets we’ve gotten inquiries from,” Unger said. “Last year, the academy began its own pre-show leading to the ceremony, but we came to that game late. For years, E! Entertainment did a multihour pre-show, as did KABC and KTLA, which had a syndicated show.
“They were taking advantage of the event to give their viewers a lot of celebrities.”
And then there’s the fashion.
“I’ve got a lot of angry, complaining letters this year from people who didn’t get arrival-area credentials,” Unger allowed. “They’ll say, `We’ve planned 12 pages of fashion coverage.’ Yeah, I understand everyone’s interested in fashion — and whatever someone’s wearing becomes the flavor of the day — but I’m the publicity coordinator for the Academy Awards and we honor achievement in films.
“It’s not my priority to get coverage about what people are wearing.”
Separating the wheat from the chaff of journalism is a thankless task, indeed.
“I’ve got file drawers filled with material sent to verify how great and important an outlet thinks it is,” she added. “Then, inevitably, when we send out letters saying we can’t accommodate their requests, the faxes start flowing … `Don’t you know who I am? I’m so important. …’ To a large degree, those people are absolutely right.
“They are wonderful, professional, legitimate media outlets that we would love to have, but we don’t have enough room.”
So, where does one set a cut-off point? Does St. Louis make the cut, while Omaha stays home?
“This is a year-round organization that does a lot of things other than the Academy Awards,” she argued. “We tend to look very favorably on those organizations we work with on a year-round basis. So, mixed in with those outlets that have enormous reach and enormous audiences, you may find some smaller ones that have worked over the course of the year to keep people aware of the things that we do.”
Increasingly, these would include the many Internet sites that have been launched since last March. But, how does one rank one dot.com above another when no one is quite sure if any have a discernible audience.
“It’s very difficult, because there still isn’t any uniform standard of measurement in terms of the number of people an outlet reaches,” Unger said. “It’s not as simple as asking a reporter what their paper’s circulation is. Nobody can give you a concrete number that’s comparable to someone else’s concrete number.”
This year, stand-alone Web sites were required to expend a great deal of energy to prove their worthiness for inclusion under the Big Top.
Predominantly an entertainment news service, eStar.com, for instance, was asked to demonstrate how it covered the nominations before it got a bleacher and press room pass.
“I understand the physical limitations — every time I turn around, someone tells me they’re starting a new site — but we should be treated the same as our brethren in the press and TV-radio,” said Alex Ben Block, editor in chief and vice president of eStar.com. “At some point this will become a 1st Amendment issue.”
Block, a former editor of the Hollywood Reporter, refused to comment on the size of his site’s audience. To help raise its profile, though, Mr. Blackwell has been recruited to comment on this year’s fashion parade.
Despite compiling a book-length portfolio of evidence to the contrary, Hollywood Stock Exchange lost out because it was considered to be little more than an on-line game (like rotisserie baseball), with industry-related prizes and tidbits of information. Instead, it is sponsoring one of the evening’s hottest parties, which will be Webcast live on hsx.com.
David Poland, who covers Hollywood for TNT Roughcut.com, also was critical of the process, which constantly forces dot.com companies to prove their worth.
“This jumping through hoops is goofy and might have been an attempt to get even more publicity for the nominations,” he said. “But, the academy isn’t the only organization having a hard time with this. The NCAA basketball tournament and Grammys didn’t allow any dot.coms — besides their own — to cover their events this year.”
The issue isn’t likely to be resolved anytime soon, certainly not before the awards ceremony moves to its permanent home on Hollywood Boulevard, in 2002.
“The problem with building a new venue is that you can bring to the table everything you know now, but you have no idea of what will happen once you get there,” said Unger. “Who knows what we will need once it’s built? I’m not worried about space for the press rooms and other backstage areas, but the Orchid Walk arrivals area is going to be no bigger than the smallest arrivals area I’ve ever had, and that’s this year.”
