A look inside Hollywood and the movies : Never Too Early to Make Much Ado About Oscar

Next year’s Academy Awards may seem a long way off to most people, but the Samuel Goldwyn Co. apparently has decided it’s never too early to launch an Oscar campaign.

In an unusual move, the company mailed out 6,000 postcards early last month touting its art-house hit, “Much Ado About Nothing,” starring Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson. Below the laudatory blurbs was the phrase “For Your Consideration--All Categories”--a staple of the Oscar ad copy that normally begins appearing in the trade publications in December.

The same mailing list, including the 4,500 voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and others in the entertainment industry, has been treated to two items since then: a soundtrack CD to call attention to the score by Patrick Doyle, and a paperback book that includes the screenplay and notes by Branagh, who also directed the movie. A lavish color brochure on the film is being sent out this week in hand-addressed envelopes, and a video will go out in mid-November.

“Our goal is to be done when everyone else is just starting,” said Richard Bornstein, Goldwyn’s vice president of worldwide marketing. He estimated the cost of the “Much Ado About Nothing” Oscar marketing campaign, including one trade ad to jog memories at balloting time, at $200,000--a fraction of what the studios are likely to spend. Ballots are scheduled to be mailed to academy members Jan. 7, with nominations to be announced Feb. 9.

The objective behind these goodies, said company chairman Samuel Goldwyn Jr., is to nudge academy members to see the movie, which opened last May to glowing reviews and has gone on to gross more than $22 million, making it one of the most successful film adaptations of a Shakespeare play. It is conventional wisdom in Hollywood, however, that movies that open early in the year can sometimes get overlooked at Oscar time.

“If I’m sure that everybody in the academy has seen the picture, then I’ll feel we’ve had our shot,” Goldwyn said. “I genuinely believe it’s one of the five best pictures this year.”

He said studios resort to Oscar-related advertising because of “the egos involved” but wind up simply wasting money. “There’s a vast tendency by the studios to underestimate the intelligence of the people in the academy,” he said. “They really believe that all of that advertising sells (the picture), which it doesn’t. It’d be much better to donate all that money to the homeless.”

Goldwyn’s strategy has caught the attention of studios, which are just beginning to plan their Oscar promotions. “I was surprised to get (the material) so early,” said one studio publicist. “But everybody’s talking about it, so how bad can that be?”

Not to be outdone, Sony Pictures Classics is in the midst of mailing out 4,000 paperback copies of Virginia Woolf’s satiric novel “Orlando” to promote the Oscar chances of actress Tilda Swinton and others connected with the film.

Sony Pictures Classics co-president Tom Bernard predicted that this year studios will be inundating academy members with more material than ever. “It’s going to come in waves,” he said. “You’re going to get books, screenplays, and even trailers for the tapes they’re going to send you.”