ANGLING FOR OSCARS: DOES IT PAY TO ADVERTISE?

And the winner is . . . “Places in the Heart.”

Not for best picture, but for the most money spent in quest of this year’s Academy Award nominations: more than $150,000, what with ads and mass mailings to academy voters, one including brochures and the other with gift sound-track albums.

It may not be possible to buy Oscar nominations, which will be announced Wednesday, but there’s never any lack of trying. Especially this year. For the past two months, the major movie studios have flooded Daily Variety and the Hollywood Reporter with ads touting their films and the people who made them.

“This has been the biggest year (for Oscar advertising) since 1979,” said Michael Malak, Daily Variety’s director of marketing. “Last year everybody figured there was no way to compete with or beat the ‘Terms of Endearment’ phenomenon. This year the field is more wide open.”

Lynne Segall, marketing director for the Hollywood Reporter, estimated that spending may be up as much as 30%, particularly by two studios, Warner Bros. and Columbia Pictures. “Twentieth Century Fox didn’t spend much this year because they didn’t really have any movies to push,” Segall said.

The ads have ranged from the predictable (those hyping Sally Field as best actress for “Places in the Heart” and David Lean as best director of “Passage to India”) to the ridiculous (a best-supporting-actor ad for comedy writer and sometime actor Bruce Vilanch in “The Ice Pirates,” which was paid for by his mother and carried her signature).

A few pre-nomination favorites didn’t get any individual ads, including Albert Finney in “Under the Volcano” or Sissy Spacek in “The River.”

There are no figures correlating dollars spent with nominations received, but the studios believe that backing a movie with trade ads certainly can’t hurt.

“You’ve got to take a certain number of ads just to remind the constituency that you’re in the race,” said Lloyd Leipzig, a marketing consultant for “Amadeus,” on which Orion Pictures spent more than $120,000 for awards advertising.

Even if nominations aren’t achieved, the potential nominee is grateful for the attention, and more likely to work with the studio again on his or her next project.

“There are some things you do for relationships,” said Steve Randall, senior vice president of marketing for Tri-Star Pictures. “A lot of these decisions are made on that basis. If you want to be involved with someone in the long haul, taking these ads doesn’t hurt, and it represents a modest investment.”

Not incidentally, the stars, directors and producers in these ads might remember that such costs are charged to each picture’s publicity budget. That is, what they get is what they pay for.

A full-page black-and-white ad in Daily Variety costs $1,200. Color can cost an additional $400 to $650 for each color used, while a metallic sheen means shelling out another $800. A spare-no-expense single ad could cost as much as $3,200, according to Malak.

Rates at the Reporter are slightly less: $1,193 for a full-page black-and-white ad and a maximum of $2,800 for a four-color ad. About 70% of the ads sold use four colors, Segall said.

Malak claims that his paper gets more Oscar ads than the Reporter, and that its ads are considered more prestigious in the industry. Segall acknowledged that Variety received more “Amadeus” ads and also printed an expensive “Greystoke” insert that was too big to be used in the Reporter’s smaller format.

Only the Variety ads were tabulated, since the same ones ran in the Reporter on different days. But as Segall insisted, with the exceptions of “Amadeus” and “Greystoke,” “I can tell you that the totals are absolutely equal.”

“Places in the Heart” had 28 1/2 full-page ads in Daily Variety between Dec. 3 and Jan. 25 (when the nomination polls closed). The other big spenders were “Amadeus” with 27 ads, “The Natural” with 21 1/2 pages and “Birdy” with 20 1/2 ads.

It’s no coincidence that three of the four top spenders are released by Tri-Star Pictures, the newest major movie company and one seemingly determined to make an impression on the 4,100 voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

In all, Tri-Star spent close to $400,000 pushing “Places in the Heart,” “The Natural” and “Birdy,” along with a few lesser items such as “Runaway” (10 1/2 pages), “The Muppets Take Manhattan” (4 1/2 pages), and even “Supergirl” (3 1/2 pages).

Another $75,000 to $100,000 was spent on three glossy color brochures on “Places,” “Natural” and “Birdy” that Tri-Star mailed to all the academy members for which it had home addresses. The studio spent probably another $75,000 sending out the sound-track albums to “Muppets Take Manhattan,” “Natural” and “Places in the Heart.”

Several studio executives queried for this article privately expressed the opinion that Tri-Star overdid it, particularly with its mailers. “Academy members resent getting junk mail,” said a marketing vice president with a rival studio. “This isn’t exactly a K mart crowd that’s going to be wooed with brochures.”

But Randall thinks the ads can make a difference. “There is certainly a cause and effect relationship between advertising and nominations,” Randall said in a phone interview from New York. “We feel it’s money well spent.”

The academy itself frowns on blatant hucksterism when it comes to Oscar voting--at least officially frowns on it.

It says in its printed foreword to the list of eligible movies, “This year, as in the past, you will be importuned by advertisements, promotional gifts and other lobbying tactics, in an attempt to solicit your vote. Each year these crude and excessive solicitations embarrass the academy, embarrass you and demean the significance of the Academy Award of merit for outstanding achievement.”

One publicity vice president tried to explain why a studio would take ad for, say, Klaus Kinski as best actor in “Little Drummer Girl” or best supporting actor for John Lone as the Neanderthal in “Iceman,” neither of whom would seem to have much of a chance at a nomination: “You just can’t say no.

“More and more actors are requesting Academy Award support as a requirement in their contracts,” continued the executive, who requested anonymity. “Even if they don’t, if Tom Selleck can get ads for best actor in ‘Runaway,’ how do you tell Charles Durning he doesn’t get one for ‘Mass Appeal’?”

So who are the most hyped performers angling for Oscar nominations, as represented by ads in Daily Variety?

Leading the actress hopefuls are Sally Field, with four full pages plugging her performance in “Places in the Heart”; Shelley Long, with three pages for “Irreconcilable Differences”; Kathleen Turner, with three pages pushing her in “Romancing the Stone” (but none for “Crimes of Passion”) and Christine Lahti, with three pages pulling for her supporting role in “Swing Shift,” the kind of overlooked movie that Oscar advertising is designed to help.

A flock of actresses got two ads apiece, including Judy Davis and Peggy Ashcroft from “Passage to India,” Diane Keaton for “Mrs. Soffel” (plus one more for “Little Drummer Girl”), Jessica Lange for “Country,” Meryl Streep in “Falling in Love,” Vanessa Redgrave in “The Bostonians” and Lesley Anne Warren in “Choose Me.”

Surprisingly, there were no separate ads touting Sissy Spacek’s performance in “The River,” Darryl Hannah’s aquatic turn in “Splash” or Jacqueline Bisset’s work in “Under the Volcano.”

Clint Eastwood’s Oscar day was made by Warner Bros., which took out seven separate ads for his work in “Tightrope,” the most exposure of any single performer. Steve Martin, riding the coattails of his New York critics’ awards, was given three full pages for his comic androgynous portrayal in “All of Me.”

“Greystoke” received the most lavish publicity of any single movie when Warner Bros. ran a 28-page full-color insert in Daily Variety Jan. 8. Neither Warners nor Variety would say how much the insert cost (it consisted mostly of color pictures from the film, preceded by a page suggesting nominations for everything from best technicals to primate make-up), but it was a dramatic way to reach Daily Variety’s 18,815 subscribers.

It certainly looked better than the bottom part of the Oscar spending list. MGM/UA proved especially stingy, taking out a half-page ad each for “Teachers,” “Red Dawn” and “Just the Way You Are.”

As for relationships, the one Fox has with actor Michael Keaton couldn’t have been helped by the lone half-page Fox took out for him as the star of “Johnny Dangerously.” Young Jason Pressman rated a full page for his supporting role in “The Stone Boy”--paid for by his father.

Zan Dubin provided research assistance for this article.