Judging by the vigorous, sometimes vicious, publicity-crazy, bank-breaking Oscar campaigns that have been waged over the past few months, you’d think the Academy Awards mean everything to the big movie studios. The funny thing is, judging by the films they release the rest of the year, you’d think the Oscars don’t mean much to the studios at all.
Consider, for example, Universal and 20th Century Fox, which have been taking out numerous ads, printing up special booklets and staging events to push “A Beautiful Mind” and “Moulin Rouge,” respectively.
Universal’s highly profitable 2001 slate was built around familiar franchises (“Hannibal,” “Josie and the Pussycats,” “The Mummy Returns,” “Jurassic Park III” and “American Pie 2”), stabs at the youth market (“The Fast and the Furious,” “The Musketeer”) and the occasional saccharine adult drama (“Captain Corelli’s Mandolin,” “K-Pax”). Its only other all-out critical success, “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” was a co-production with Miramax.
Meanwhile, 20th Century Fox overloaded with awful-to-middling comedies (“Monkeybone,” “Say It Isn’t So,” “Freddy Got Fingered,” “Someone Like You,” “Black Knight,” “Shallow Hal,” “Joe Somebody”), familiar franchises (“Dr. Dolittle 2,” “Planet of the Apes”) and other bits of escapism (“Glitter,” “Kiss of the Dragon,” “Don’t Say a Word,” “Joy Ride,” “From Hell,” “Behind Enemy Lines”).
No wonder “A Beautiful Mind” and “Moulin Rouge” are the studios’ prime Oscar contenders. What else even would qualify?
“If you took all the money that was spent on [Oscar] ads, you could make a dozen edgy, interesting, $1 million films or $2 million films,” “Moulin Rouge” director/producer Baz Luhrmann said.
Not only did the studios make few of those challenging, interesting films last year, but much of the big-ticket Oscar bait failed to click: “The Majestic,” “Vanilla Sky,” “The Shipping News,” “Ali” and “A.I. Artificial Intelligence.”
You might figure such a depleted field would lead to a lethargic Oscar race. Yet lo and behold, the film companies are campaigning harder than ever to win that little gold fellow representing excellence in cinema.
“It’s a pretty wide-open race, so there are a lot of people who have a chance in a lot of categories,” Fox Filmed Entertainment chairman Tom Rothman said.
“Each studio saw a great opportunity to win the great prizes, and they’ve really gone for it,” agreed Miramax spokesman Matthew Hiltzig.
Readers of the Los Angeles Times and New York Times, which reach a high proportion of the Academy’s 5,700-plus voting members, have been treated to a large number of two- and three-page advertising spreads for movies that have been in the theaters for months or already are out on home video.
At a time of economic downturn, the trade papers Variety and Hollywood Reporter have been flush not just with full-page and fold-out ads but also a pop-up ad for “Shrek” and a behind-the-scenes DVD packaged with a full-page cover ad for “A Beautiful Mind.”
Variety publisher Charles Koones said Oscar-related advertising in his paper and Web site has exceeded $10 million this year, up about 20 percent from last year (though not up from the “Saving Private Ryan” vs. “Shakespeare in Love” year of 1998). That amounts to more than $1,700 spent per Academy voter in Variety alone.
Glossy picture books for “A Beautiful Mind,” “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring,” “Black Hawk Down” and other contenders have gone out to Academy voters and media representatives. USA Films’ “Gosford Park” campaign included a boxed board game based on the Robert Altman murder mystery.
Nominees make rounds
For four consecutive nights earlier this month, eight “Moulin Rouge” dancers did the can-can atop a billboard, ostensible for the movie’s DVD release, on Los Angeles’ Sunset Boulevard. Academy members also have been invited to numerous events featuring the nominees, such as an “In the Bedroom”-related Sissy Spacek film retrospective at the University of Southern California and various Q&A screenings.
“You see a lot of people everywhere,” Variety managing editor Timothy Gray said. “Ian McKellen [`Lord of the Rings’] is everywhere. Ben Kingsley [`Sexy Beast’] is everywhere. Will Smith [`Ali’] is everywhere. Baz Luhrmann is everywhere. Russell Crowe [`A Beautiful Mind’] is everywhere. That seems to be a lot more aggressive this year. This year Miramax [with `In the Bedroom’] seems the most subdued of the five [Best Picture] nominees, which is interesting because they’re always the ones who are accused of overly aggressive campaigning.”
“I’ve never seen such prolonged and vigorous campaigning as this year,” Los Angeles-based film critic/historian Leonard Maltin said. “I’ve been on this beat now for 20 years, and I’ve never had phone calls before saying, `Would you like to have breakfast or lunch with so-and-so?'”
Tactics pay off
One theory behind the escalated hype is that the studios took notes on the recent Oscar dogfights between Miramax and DreamWorks. With both companies aggressively courting voters through special events as well as pricey ad campaigns, Miramax’s “Shakespeare in Love” trumped DreamWorks’ “Saving Private Ryan” in 1998, and DreamWorks took the top prize the following two years with “American Beauty” and “Gladiator.”
“Everyone had to admit that the two of them are really, really good at this, and I think they’re borrowing a lot of their techniques,” Gray said.
Those techniques, in turn, were developed after the Academy banned home mailings and phone calls following the 1995 race, in which “Apollo 13” fliers filled more mailboxes than the combined campaign literature of Rod Blagojevich, Paul Vallas, Jim Ryan and Corinne Wood.
The various companies also know how much Oscar can bolster the bottom line: An ACNielsen EDI study shows that in the past 10 years, the Best Picture winner has collected, on average, 26 percent of its box-office gross after nominations were announced. Movies can get a boost even if they’re out of the theaters at Oscar time.
“It’s been very advantageous for us timing-wise because the [`Moulin Rouge’] home video was out timed to go with the Oscar announcements, and because of that we’ve gotten a huge uptick [in sales],” Rothman said.
At times the major Oscar races have resembled ugly political campaigns. An item about “A Beautiful Mind” protagonist John Nash’s alleged anti-Semitism — while in the throes of schizophrenia — surfaced before the final Oscar balloting on Matthew Drudge’s Web site, and partisan carping about other studios’ overspending has been routine.
Mudslinging part of game
“There’s always been mudslinging, but like everything else it’s a little accelerated this year because everybody has a chance to win,” Gray said.
(Universal officials declined to be interviewed for this story.)
Hollywood accounting procedures tend to be slipperier than an Illinois pol running for governor, and pinning down Oscar campaign expenditures is especially tough. Are TV commercials touting the eight Oscar nominations for the still-in-theaters “A Beautiful Mind” or the out-on-video “Moulin Rouge” part of the movies’ general marketing campaigns or messages to Academy voters?
“With a pack of IRS auditors you couldn’t figure it out: What was spent for distribution and what was for the Academy,” said one veteran Oscar campaigner, who asked not to be named because of his role promoting one of this year’s contenders.
But pretty much everyone agrees that the spending has reached new heights this year.
“It’s out of hand. It’s crazy. It’s nuts,” lamented Revolution Studios partner Tom Sherak, whose company produced “Black Hawk Down.” “We could find a cure for a new disease if we used that money the right way.”
In a sense what’s happening with the Oscars parallels an overall movie business trend accentuating marketing over content. Earlier this month Motion Picture Association of America president Jack Valenti announced that the cost of making a major-studio movie took a rare 13 percent downturn last year, from $54.8 million to $47.7 million, while the average marketing expense rose 14 percent, from $27.3 million to $31 million.
“In certain areas of cinema — which is big, wide commercial movies — marketing considerations tend to dominate because it’s so expensive to sell those movies,” Rothman said. “I think it’s fair to say that pure dramas — expensive, big-picture dramas — are hard to make.”
Giving back?
Rothman, Sherak and others say the Oscar-fare slack has been picked up by the so-called indie divisions of the major studios, such as Fox Searchlight, Universal Focus, Sony Pictures Classics, Paramount Classics and Disney subsidiary Miramax.
“It’s just a different way of them getting made,” Sherak said. “The smaller movies are made because the budgets are less, the actors take cuts in their salary because they believe in the material, and the way they do that is because there are specialized units of those big companies that are turning that out. Those pictures have to get made in order for this industry to be able to give back to the culture.”
Still, it’s a funny way for the industry to give back: movies made on shoestring budgets with the talent sacrificing dollars because they actually care about substance. There has always been a split between the studios’ overtly commercial projects and the “prestige pictures” they’d unveil around Oscar time, but at a time when stockholders reign supreme, prestige is less and less the business of Hollywood.
The question now is whether the industry is devaluing the Oscars, which, even in this era of ever-proliferating awards shows, maintain the most credibility and popularity of any entertainment prize fest. Theoretically the ratings for this year’s telecast should be up because the major races are more suspenseful than usual.
But are you really that worked up over Russell vs. Denzel, Halle vs. Sissy or “A Beautiful Mind” vs. “The Lord of the Rings” vs. “Moulin Rouge”?
“I think as hard as it’s always been to take the Oscars seriously, it’s even more difficult now,” said Damien Bona, author of the tart Academy Awards history “Inside Oscar 2” (and co-author of the original “Inside Oscar,” both Ballantine). “There’s a feeling that because the Academy is largely made up of the same people who are making these releases — all these big Hollywood movies we don’t want to see in the first place — you can’t put a lot of faith in their judgment.”
That said, the bulk of this year’s nominees represent quality work. What would be nice is if the values espoused on the Academy Awards telecast held over for the ensuing months at the theaters.
After all, this is the night when artistic achievement, not blockbuster success, supposedly merits the industry’s gold medal.
“Everybody in this business strives to get to the top of the mountain,” Sherak said. “Nobody wants to be at the bottom of the mountain. Most people don’t want to be in the middle of the mountain. People want to get to the pinnacle, and the way to get to the pinnacle in our business is to win the Academy Award.”
