2024-03-03 04:08:02
Few have heard of the Dutch film today Character (1997), but won the Oscar for best foreign language film. The same thing happened with Memories of Antonia (nineteen ninety five). In the early 1990s, the Netherlands produced more Oscar successes, with nominations for dramas Twin sisters (2002) y So & So (2001). Haven’t you heard of them either? This streak was the result of a game from the Dutch film industry: After realizing that the only members of the Academy with the time and desire to see the international films that were up for the Oscar were usually at the end of their careers, the Dutch limited themselves to presenting tasteful dramas.
“At that time, the voters of the Academy were all retiredolder people,” he says Claudia Landsberger, then director of the Dutch film promotion agency Holland Film. They showed the films non-stop and placed advertisements in the specialized magazines of the sector. “At that time, we could still have a party at the Consulate’s house. “Paul Verhoeven and Jan de Bont came to meet all the members of the Academy.”
In seven years, the Dutch managed four Oscar nominations and two wins, all of them for films that most audiences outside the Netherlands didn’t even know existed. Its success reveals an uncomfortable truth about awards campaigns. It’s not necessarily the best films that win, but rather the ones that are promoted most brazenly and cleverly.
Sometimes it can be as simple as choosing the right date or dates. This year, many British moviegoers were taken aback by the decision to release the film Alexander Payne Those who stay, a warm comedy-drama set during the Christmas holidays. Especially since in the United States it was released in limited theaters at the end of October and in large theaters two weeks later. But the lengthy deployment to the UK coincided with the final round of voting for the Bafta, and it was the equivalent of outsider in a horse race. Everyone had been paying so much attention bookies’ favorite Cillian Murphyby Oppenheimerwho were taken by surprise by the avalanche of late publicity in favor of the protagonist of Those who stay, Paul Giamatti.
In the end, Murphy won the Bafta, but both he and Giamatti had triumphed in the Golden Globes, in the categories of Best Actor in a Drama and Best Actor in a Comedy/Musical, respectively. The expectation generated by the awards Those who stay It also made the film a box office hit in the United Kingdom, something that might not have happened had it been released earlier.
“Look, you have to stay interested,” the movie mogul used to say Harvey Weinstein about the annual Oscar ceremony. Years before their discovery sexual crimes, Weinstein was famous for doing everything possible to make films produced by him Miramax, the studio he co-founded with his brother Bob, won awards. in his book The Oscar Wars (“The Oscar War”), the carr Michael Schulman recounts in exhaustive detail the nefarious campaign tactics that Weinstein deployed, most notably to ensure that Shakespeare in Love, from Miramax, beat DreamWorks already Saving Private Ryan, of Paramount, in the race for the Oscar for best film in 1998. Among other things, he told The New York Times what Saving Private Ryan had declined rapidly after its famous opening beach landing scene. There were also reports from independent Miramax publicists that They “totally destroyed” Steven Spielberg’s film before other journalists.
In a moment of The Oscar war Schulman describes how Weinstein borrowed campaign tactics of the political world to ensure that his films emerged victorious. “In presenting the brave D-Day sequence of Saving Private Ryan as a liability, Weinstein had channeled one of Karl Rove’s rules of the dark arts of politics: Attack your opponent’s strength, not his weakness.”
When it came to convincing Academy voters to vote for his films, Weinstein was no stranger to the approach either. “sex sells.” Early in his career, when promoting a dark 1987 Scandinavian drama titled Pelle the Conqueror, published posters with the naked back of a woman who barely appears in the film. And it worked. The film won the award for best foreign language film at the 1988 Oscars.
Later, when the company was promoting The crying game (1992), from Neil Jordan, about an IRA member who falls in love with a transsexual woman, Weinstein and his team desperately tried to keep the film’s co-star out of the public eye. jay davidson, The actor who played the transsexual character was finally nominated in the category of best supporting actor, which did nothing more than reveal the film’s central twist.
Gone are the days when you could buy prizes. The most notorious case was that of the 1982 Golden Globes, when the Israeli millionaire financier Meshulam Riklis He flew members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association to Las Vegas. In response to the hospitality of Riklis, his young wife, Pia Zadora, was awarded the prize for New Star of the Year for his criticized performance in the thriller Butterfly. The other nominees were Elizabeth McGovern by Ragtime y Kathleen Turner by Fire in the body, but they had no chance. “With her pout and her undulating girl-woman hips, Pia Zadora is an American Bardot”, enthused critic Rex Reed of his performance. No one seemed to find it incongruous that this blatantly sexist quote will be used in campaign ads.
He “Pia Zadora scandal”, as it quickly became known, it represented the nadir of the awards campaigns. However, since then there have been many subterfuges and devious practices in the race for the Oscars and Golden Globes.
Every time the rules of the awards campaigns are modified, they create gaps that the most inventive filmmakers and distributors can take advantage of. The Chilean filmmaker Maite Alberdi He received his second Oscar nomination this year for his feature documentary The eternal memory, a love story about a marriage affected by an Alzheimer’s diagnosis. Alberdi freely admits that his previous Oscar nomination, for his 2020 documentary The mole agent -which is currently being turned into a drama series starring Ted Danson-, was helped by the Covid epidemic.
“The mole agent “It was an independent film,” he recalls. “We didn’t have a budget for a campaign, but we got the nomination because the awards campaign was more democratic. “Everything was online, so you didn’t need a budget to do screenings in Los Angeles.” During the pandemic, Hollywood studios had nothing to waste money on. There were no lavish parties or glitzy in-person screenings. That meant that smaller films could compete with big ones on equal terms.
On the eve of this year’s Oscars, there have been the usual recriminations and murmurings about forgetfulness and omissions. One of the points of contention are the slights to Barbieafter what Greta Gerwig y Margot Robbie They will be left out of the awards for best director and actress, respectively. Defenders of films like Ferrari, Saltburn, The Iron Claw, Asteroid City y Priscilla They have also protested his lack of nominations.
Do the best movies win? Sometimes, but it certainly helps if they have advisors behind the scenes willing to talk up their merits, throw lavish parties, and generally do the beating on their behalf. And quietly insisting to voters that, by the way, all the other candidates are shit…
* Of The Independent From great britain. Special for Page 12.