Posted on 07/16/2004 2:35:26 PM PDT by weegee
With more than seven months to go before Hollywood's next Oscar ceremony, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences has banned studios from attacking rival films or actors in their upcoming awards campaigns. The latest attempt to cut back on the Oscar campaign dirty tricks was triggered by an ad Dreamworks ran last season. It explicity pushed Shohreh Aghdashloo for her performance in The House of Sand and Fog as being better than Renee Zellweger's in epic Cold Mountain.
Zellweger went on to claim the coveted statuette, but the Academy evidently didn't like what it saw. This time around studio executives, already ankle-deep in campaign strategy, will need to show they can play nicely.
According to the Academy's official website, studios will be forbidden from making "disparaging references to other pictures or individuals competing in a given category in ads, mailings, websites or other forms of campaign communication."
Another new rule allows studios to send voters coupons for free entry to public screenings at cinemas. "Coupon mailings," the Academy notes, "have their principal application in areas away from Los Angeles and New York where the presentation of an Academy card for admission during the Oscar season may be met with a blank stare from a theater cashier."
Last year the Academy threatened members with expulsion if they indulged in aggressive marketing practices that flew in the face of its regulations. Specifically, the body outlawed any form of advertising that featured quotes or comments from any of its 6,000-plus members.
The 77th Academy Awards are scheduled to take place in Hollywood on Feb 27, 2005.
Have to wonder how much this "rule change" exists to protect Michael Moore from criticism as Oscar night approaches. What happened to "free speech"?
Other documentary filmmakers are not permitted to question the honesty in presenting a "best documentary award" to a fraud?
Too bad the Academy can't convince its members to show the same level of respect and honesty when talking about the sitting President of the United States.
Moved to Chat?
Why do Nicole "Simple Life of an adopted daughter of a mid-80s singer" Ritchie's comments about Whoopi Goldberg remain in NEWS (it isn't on the sidebar but it is in the News section).
There is also a "breaking" story about MoveOn suing Fox News (in an act that is their response to being sued by Fox for their movie Outfoxed).
I claim that this Oscar rules change is a political ploy to shield a probable nomination for Michael Moore from criticism by other filmmakers.
Perhaps.
But as someone who tracks the Oscar races regularly, there has been PLENTY of mud slinging over the last few years amongst major nominees. A Beautiful Mind was bashed heavily right before the Oscars in an attempt to bring it down, there were feeble, thinly veiled competing studio attempts to bring down The Return of the King (campaign quips like "Mystic River's only special effect is brilliance"), and there was the mentioned incident regarding Zellweger. This has been an issue for a while, in major categories (Best Picture, the acting categories) especially.
Was the third LOTR film WAY better than the first two or were the films in 2001 and 2002 that much stronger such that LOTR didn't win major nominations for films produced those years?
It is a fair question. There has long been a Hollywood bias against SF/Horror/Fantasy genre pictures. Back in 1986 Dennis Hopper was heavily talked up for Blue Velvet. He got nominated for a smaller role in Hoosiers instead. He had cleaned his life up and it was a pat on the back. Frank Booth was too unfriendly a character to be nominated "best" anything. Fast forward a few years and Anthony Hopkins wins for a role as a cannibal serial killer in Silence Of The Lambs.
Times change. Some in Hollywood detest that sort of film (and not just because of the grue). Why should "old Hollywood" types be silenced in their championing a different film?
Meanwhile there are still attempts to revoke Michael Moore's Oscar although I don't ever see that happening.
When Return of the King came around, somehow the series had gone beyond the preconceptions that the Academy has about fantasy. And the Academy has a complex about rewarding things that are "due". The fact the Return of the King was the third, and widely viewed as the best, in an acclaimed trilogy, and the fact that the first two films were Best Picture nominees but lost helped seal its win. It was pretty unbeatable.
In other words, people sort of rallied around Return of the King because the Trilogy was due, but it also was more worthy of winning. For example, in 2003 there was a BIG campaign by Harvey Weinstein for the Academy to vote for Martin Scorsese for Best Director because Martin had never won before, not because he deserved it that year. The overzealous campaign backfired, and Scorsese lost again.
So as for ROTK, they didn't just vote to reward the series. If ROTK wasn't good enough to justify the win, it wouldn't have won, though guess is that the "due" factor sort of overrode the Acadamy tradition of snubbing fantasy/sci-fi films.
I am a Peter Jackson fan. I just don't understand what made part III SO much better than I or II. Was there seriously an increase in the drama of the final installment? Could the first two have been improved (or is the EXTRA footage on the DVD an acknowledgement of this).
Dr, Jeckyll won a couple of awards (although the first WINNING film was suppressed for awhile).
Aliens got a nod (Rambo in outer space).
I am a Peter Jackson fan. I just don't understand what made part III SO much better than I or II. Was there seriously an increase in the drama of the final installment? Could the first two have been improved (or is the EXTRA footage on the DVD an acknowledgement of this).
Dr, Jeckyll won a couple of awards (although the first WINNING film was suppressed for awhile).
Aliens got a nod (Rambo in outer space).
It wasn't really that ROTK was so much better. The fact that it was acclaimed, however, and the fact that it was the third in the trilogy, when the first two had lost Best Picture, made for a feeling that it was owed. A lot of people say that ROTK's win was more for the entire trilogy, and that the Academy decided to wait for its conclusion to reward it, rather than give Best Picture to an unfinished story. While one could argue the specifics of that assertion, there is a lot of truth in it. The Academy can be strange in its reasoning.
Anyway, ROTK was the first ever fantasy Best Picture winner, amazingly. No sci-fi film has ever won Best Picture, and The Silence of the Lambs is the only Horror film to win it. Star Wars, E.T., Beauty and the Beast (the Disney animation) and The Wizard of Oz come to mind as other fantasy BP nominees. As for Horror, The Exorcist, Jaws and The Sixth Sense were nominated. The Academy obviously prefers drama.
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