By Cara Buckley / New York Times News Service
OVER the past few months in New York, invitees of a specific sort have had a choice selection of star-strewn events to attend.
There was a deluxe buffet hosted by Emma Stone at the Rainbow Room; tea with Marion Cotillard at Il Gattopardo; refreshments at the Lotus Club with Mark Wahlberg; nibblies with Annette Bening at Bistro Milano; amuse-bouches at Le Cirque with Nicole Kidman and Dev Patel.
This is all par for the course during Oscar season: The stars were peddling their awards-hopeful films. While recent, rather unclear, guidelines issued by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have resulted in some paring down of the opulence, the glamour and exclusivity remain—still with the same basic aim. Each gathering is paired with a screening, for the studios that pay for these events are trying to get tastemakers, writers and, most important, academy members to see their films on the big screen.
This modest goal is harder than it might seem. And it’s one major reason the subset of Hollywood publicist known as an Oscar strategist exists, along with its bread-and-butter devil’s-spawn: the awards campaign.
Likened to political campaigns yet infinitely less consequential, complicated or—it can now be unequivocally said—nasty, awards campaigns are behind virtually all of the movies and actors being talked about for big prizes this and most every season. And Gene Hackman, of all people, might be partly to blame.
Arrival, La La Land, Lion, Manchester by the Sea, Moonlight and Fences, and their stars, are all backed by teams singularly focused on drumming up every vote they can from, among other quarters, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the screen actors, directors and producers guilds and academy members.
“It’s not the dark arts,” said Lisa Taback, a longtime strategist who has worked on films like Spotlight and Room. “We’re trying to get people to see the films on the big screen.”
Getting people—even those who work in the industry—to do that apparently is a bit of a craft. Everyone knows films are best seen at a theater by a captive audience rather than via a screener in one’s highly distracting home. But voters are busy people. They work, have families, drive in Los Angeles traffic, are invited to way too many screenings. (Retirees are the exception; they tend to get to screenings—although new academy regulations weed out older voters.)
So, studios dangle receptions and Q&As with movie stars as bait. This serves a dual purpose: It can inflate a voter’s sense of connection with and ownership of the film. Seeing Fences at Lincoln Center is one thing; seeing it alongside Denzel Washington and Viola Davis is something else altogether.
“It’s really important not to overestimate what campaigns contribute to the race,” said Dick Guttman, who at 83 is a veteran press agent. “Basically, a film has to be great to get there.”
Of course, as Guttman well knows, it pays to have a few tricks up one’s sleeve.
Guttman was a thirty-something agent working for Paul Newman in the late 1960s when the star’s film Rachel, Rachel landed four Oscar nominations, but not one for best director. After some sleuthing, Guttman was dismayed to learn that just 40 percent of the Academy’s directors’ branch had bothered to see film.
So, a few years later, Guttman figured out a way to get the attention of more voters. He was working with a small movie that the studio, Paramount, had, he said, “assassinated”. So he teamed up with a local cable station, Z Channel, and arranged multiple “for your consideration” screenings, along with an on-air interview with the picture’s star, Hackman. The film, The Conversation, went on to receive three Oscar nominations.
Of course, it is Harvey Weinstein who is considered the king of the modern awards campaign. (He was in London for a screening of Lion with Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, and Princess Eugenie, and so was unavailable for an on-the-record chat.) He has used many ingenious tactics to outmaneuver studios and land hundreds of nominations and dozens of wins for his films. It’s not for nothing that three key Oscar strategists—Taback, Tony Angelotti and Cynthia Swartz—once worked for him.
Among Weinstein’s moves: Having Daniel Day-Lewis, who played an Irishman with cerebral palsy in My Left Foot, support the Americans With Disabilities Act before Congress. (Attendees at the film’s Capitol screening were given a chocolate foot.) Representatives from Miramax (his former company) called voters repeatedly at their homes (that’s now banned) and, according to a former publicist, set up screenings at the Motion Picture & Television Fund retirement home. According to Vulture, Weinstein hired President Barack Obama’s deputy campaign manager to work on the Silver Linings Playbook campaign. He arranged for the real Philomena—an Irishwoman forced to give up her baby as a teenager, played by Judi Dench in the film of the same name—to meet the pope.
So infamous are Weinstein’s ploys that awards watchers all but expect them of him, although his days of strongman campaigning might be behind him. While claims of mudslinging linger, Weinstein has denied involvement in various smear campaigns, including one suggesting there was child exploitation in the making of Slumdog Millionaire.
“What can I say?” he told Entertainment Weekly. “When you’re Billy the Kid and people around you die of natural causes, everyone thinks you shot them.”
Weinstein notwithstanding, strategists tend to work in subtler ways, such as recasting a film’s publicity narrative—laying out what the heart of the story is—to keep it relevant and fresh or to add emotional resonance.
For example, the space film Gravity opened to accolades for its technological wizardry, but its awards campaign focused on its story of a grieving woman’s rebirth. Then there was Spotlight, the true story of Boston journalists who unearthed the Catholic Church’s cover-up of pedophile priests. The movie faced criticism for being too modest to be an Oscar winner, but the filmmakers and cast attended events with the real-life journalists, underscoring its heft. It won best picture, although we’ll probably never know by how much, since the academy’s voter tallies are kept secret.
“It’s an unbelievably inexact science,” said Swartz, whose firm, Strategy PR, has worked on campaigns for Boyhood and The Revenant. “Because you have no idea who came in second.”
That’s what keeps strategists going to the very end. Every vote really can count.