 Starring: Jude Law, Nicole Kidman, Renee Zellweger, Eileen Atkins, Brendan Gleeson
Director: Anthony Minghella
Year Of Release: 2003
Plot: A wounded Confederate soldier named Inman struggles on a perilous journey to get back home to Cold Mountain, as well as to Ada, the woman he left behind before going off to fight in the Civil War. Along the way, he meets a long line of interesting and colourful characters, while back at home, Ada is learning the ropes of managing her deceased father's farm with Ruby, a scrappy drifter who assists and teaches Ada along the way. |
Although it depends on how much a studio wants to spend, it’s believed it costs around $5-$10 million to run a full scale Oscar campaign (the most expensive ever is believed to be for Gladiator, which is thought to have cost $20 million), and even there there’s no guarantee of walking away with the statuette. But the real question is, is it worth spending that kind of money? For example, the amount it’s believed The Hurt Locker has spent on its campaign this year, around $6 million, is about half of its total US theatrical gross, which seems a ridiculous amount of money.
The hope of course is that a few Oscar wins will attract more people to the movie and so the investment is worth it, but you can’t help wondering whether The Hurt Locker’s chances were as good before spending millions on advertising, PR, industry screenings and other events. After all, it got into major contention for the Academy Awards with very little fuss purely by winning other gongs at the beginning of the awards season. It picked up momentum on its own, so it’s difficult not to feel it didn’t need an artificial push in the past couple of months.
However many say that full-scale campaigning really can make a difference. Aggressive campaigning by Miramax is widely believed to have ensured Shakespeare In Love won Best Picture over the long favoured Saving Private Ryan. Similarly there are many who believe it was bad planning that resulted in Brokeback Mountain losing out on the top award, because the campaign for the film peaked too early, allowing Crash to sneak into people’s consciousness at just the right time. And Crash really was a whole hog campaign, taking the unprecedented step of sending out a screener to absolutely anybody who could vote in any awards ceremony – that’s over 130,000 people – just to help build momentum for when the 5,800 member of the Academy came to vote for the Oscars.
Or there’s Frost/Nixon, a movie that opened to a lukewarm response and had absolutely no Oscar buzz until the studio behind it went on a full-on advertising blitz in the trade press. As a result, it scored virtually no nominations in the earliest awards ceremony of that year, but picked up five Oscar nominations, even though most commentators wondered why on Earth it was there.
With Cold Mountain it went the other way. Miramax quickly realised it was unlikely to win Best Picture (Return of the King was a virtual lock) for the film, with Best Supporting Actress for Renee Zellweger its best bet. It launched a huge campaign to get her the win, but some suggest it wasn’t that which secured her the Oscar, but Dreamworks’ campaign to get Shoreh Aghdashloo the award backfiring. Dreamworks ran adverts for the House of Sand and Fog actress that specifically chose to quote critics who said Aghdashloo deserved to win but the award would probably go to Zellweger. It smacked of mud-slinging and pissed off a lot of people (and caused Dreamworks to go on the defensive, profusely apologising for the ad), with many suggesting that while Aghdashloo did indeed give the best performance, the accusation of dirty tricks in the campaigning ensured Zellweger the win.
A lot of people wonder though whether the problem with awards campaigns isn’t that you’re more likely to win if you do launch a big campaign, but that you’re more likely to lose if you don’t. Although there are sometimes inexplicable Oscar results, a lot of the time it seems all a campaign can do is keep a film in the voter’s consciousness, which you need to do because everyone else is doing it and if you don’t your film is more likely to get lost in the mix. It’s more an arms race than anything else. If no one campaigned, it wouldn’t matter, but as soon as someone starts, everyone else needs to as well, so they don’t lose out.
However the real reason that it might not be worth campaigning for an Oscar is that it undermines the award itself. During Oscar season, the stories in the press are rarely about which film is actually the best, instead concentrating of which movie or actors are building momentum, whose campaign is going well and whether the big studios will win because they have the money to outmuscle the little guys. Similarly nominees go on the chat show circuit, doing an endless round of thinly veiled ‘vote for me’ interviews that quickly start to seem a bit tacky. Rarely is there a sense of honouring the best in cinema.
Even many in the industry find the whole thing rather unseemly. For example a couple of years ago Meryl Streep said, "I hate the whole campaigning thing now for awards. I find it just unseemly. These campaigns are launched, like a political campaign. You run for this award. It should be that you're honoured with an award, not that your campaign was that much better or well financed." This might have been rather undermined because at the time she was there to talk up her nominated movie, Doubt, but the fact is she was contractually obliged to do interviews to try and help the film win.
Purists say the Oscar voters are a pretty conscientious bunch anyway, and won’t be as swayed by campaigns as the studios think (I’ve known a couple of BAFTA voters, and they take it very seriously, diligently watching every nominated movie they can, and refusing to vote in any categories where they haven’t seen every film). With Shakespeare In Love for example, many point out that despite Miramax’s massive campaign for the movie, most of the articles and buzz were generated organically, purely because the film itself genuinely was a lot of people’s favourite movie of the year.
Former Miramax head honcho Harvey Weinstein doesn’t see it that way. He’s often credited with starting the increasingly vociferous campaigning for Oscars by taking things to a new level in the early 90s. Before then there were a few polite ads, but Weinstein treated it almost like a political campaign, spending millions on advertising, and doing absolutely anything he could to get his movies noticed. And whether it's been because of his campaigns or simply because he had good movies, films he’s been involved with have scored hundreds of nominations over the past couple of decades.
He certainly takes credit for Shakespeare In Love’s Oscar win, seeing the millions spent on blitz campaigning as purely a case of economics, rather than about honouring the best film. For example, he believes it was his campaign that turned Chicago from an outsider into a Best Picture winner, and while he’s never said how much he actually spent trying to try and secure the win, he has said he believes the movie’s Academy Awards added another $100 million to the box office, making the investment in the Oscar campaign more than worth it.
And it really is that simple, unfortunately. While the average box office bump from an Oscar win is believed to be around $6 million – which wouldn’t seem to be good value for money when you consider the cost of many campaigns – the increased interest in an Academy Award winning film then continues through DVD sales and TV deals, meaning a major Oscar win is worth tens of millions across the lifespan of a movie. As a result, everyone wants the award, and will spend huge amount of cash to try and increase their chances of getting it, purely because both the economics and prestige means it’s worth it.
Some have suggested all award campaigning should be banned, but the studios lobby hard against that, feeling it will decrease their chances of winning and allow more little known and independent movies in. There’s also a feeling that banning advertising would be pointless anyway, as it would be difficult to stop the rest of the campaign, such as nominees going on chat shows or distributors launching massive PR campaigns to encourage positive press. There are rules though. For example, after the debacle over the campaigns for Cold Mountain and House of Sand and Fog, the Academy tightened things up, so that while you can promote your own film for an Oscar, you can’t do anything that might be considered a smear against other people’s movies (a problem The Hurt Locker is currently running up against – read more about that here), but it’s a constant battle between the Academy trying to maintain the purity of the award and the distributors trying to win at all costs.
Even so it would be nice if the Oscars really could be about the best of the year, rather than who’s run the most expensive and successful campaign. Whether the endless advertising and campaigning has the effect the studios believe it does or not, the perception now is that the Academy Awards are as much a giant battle to win as a celebration of the best in cinema, and that is a real shame.
TIM ISAAC
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