Building the Buzz for Oscar

The candidates crisscross the country on tight schedules, pressing the flesh, sitting down for interviews or conducting question-and-answer sessions in packed auditoriums. They appear on TV with Katie Couric, Bryant Gumbel, Charlie Rose and Rosie O’Donnell, or banter with Jay Leno and David Letterman.

They’re backed by massive doses of advertising on television, radio and in newspapers and magazines.

Politicians stumping for votes during the presidential primaries? Not by a long shot. These “candidates” are movie actors and directors who are in search of something almost as elusive as 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.--a golden statuette named Oscar.

The date that is important to these candidates isn’t a snowy Tuesday in New Hampshire or a Super Tuesday. This year, Hollywood’s main event is Feb. 13 in sun-splashed Beverly Hills, when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences releases this year’s list of Academy Award nominations. At stake is not only a chance to make history with an award-winning film or performance, but a potential gold mine in box office that winning an Oscar can give a film, both in ticket sales after the award and later in the video and DVD market.

Nowhere is Oscar campaigning more intense today than in the world of art house films, where small movies such as “Billy Elliot,” “Before Night Falls,” “Pollock,” “The House of Mirth,” “Sunshine,” “Dancer in the Dark,” “Malena,” “Requiem for a Dream” and “You Can Count on Me” are all vying for the spotlight against myriad major studio releases.

The race for best actor and actress is just as intense, especially when lesser-known actors in independent films must compete against megastars such as Julia Roberts and Tom Hanks. Willem Dafoe, whose portrayal of an actor and real-life Dracula in the art house release, “Shadow of the Vampire,” is creating early Oscar buzz, said the world of Oscar campaigning has changed significantly since he was nominated for best supporting actor in Oliver Stone’s 1986 Vietnam War drama, “Platoon.”

“I found out that I got nominated when my son’s baby-sitter called me up,” he said. “I wasn’t even aware that the nominations were being announced.”

Now studios flood academy voters with videotapes and DVDs. They not only blanket Hollywood’s two trade publications--Variety and the Hollywood Reporter--with expensive promotional ads, but magazines and newspapers as well. And they enlist actors and directors to go on trips that resemble whistle-stop tours. Such campaigns sell tickets, of course, but the real targets are the 5,600 academy members whose votes will be announced March 25 at the Academy Awards ceremony at the Shrine Auditorium.

A few months ago, few Americans had ever heard of Javier Bardem. Now, the handsome Spaniard, who portrays the late Cuban novelist-poet Reinaldo Arenas in “Before Night Falls,” seems to be everywhere. The heat surrounding Bardem began when he won best actor awards at this year’s Venice International Film Festival and from the National Board of Review and the National Society of Film Critics, and then exploded when he became a Golden Globe nominee for best actor in a drama alongside Tom Hanks, Geoffrey Rush, Michael Douglas and Russell Crowe.

Last year, Bardem couldn’t buy his way onto American television. Now, his handlers have booked him on Rosie O’Donnell, “The CBS Early Show,” NBC’s weekend “Today” and Charlie Rose.

The film’s director, Julian Schnabel, is getting into the act as well. Schnabel, a noted painter, and Bardem have traveled the country to promote “Before Night Falls.”

The Hollywood publicity machine, says Schnabel, has even stopped off at bookstores, where he greets customers while signing Arenas’ books.

“Can you believe I go and sign Reinaldo’s books?” Schnabel said. “I go because they will sell more books and people will read his books.

“As a painter, you couldn’t send a press release out to all the different critics and say you’re having a show, ‘Come to this show’ and they would be offended,” Schnabel noted. But movies are different. Still, he calls the Hollywood publicity machine “shameless.”

Campaigns Please Top Talent

These campaigns, which can cost millions of dollars, are driven by a number of factors besides increased box office. First, the studios believe that by heavily publicizing a film, Oscar voters will decide that this is a movie they can’t afford to pass up. At the same time, the studios often feel compelled to mount these campaigns so they can maintain good relationships with A-list actors and directors, who jealously watch rival campaigns conducted on behalf of their peers.

The academy decided to impose guidelines on Oscar campaigns in the mid-1990s after Columbia Pictures sent academy members tapes of nine of its 1993 releases in an expensive black lacquered box. The following year, other studios jumped on the packaging bandwagon. That’s when the academy adopted strict guidelines on what mailings can look like. The guidelines also included a ban on mounting organized telephone campaigns on behalf of a film and prohibitions against hosting receptions, dinners or other events for a film and inviting academy members.

Despite these restrictions, Hollywood is witnessing Oscar campaigns that, in many ways, resemble runs for the White House. When the academy mailed out its nominating ballots earlier this month, the major studios and independents spent hundreds of thousands of dollars taking out double-page and full-page advertising in the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times touting various year-end awards that their films had already received. Even small films like “Pollock” and “Malena” had full-page ads.

Universal Pictures, for example, bought double-page ads for “Erin Brockovich” in the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times despite the fact that the film opened last March, was out on video by the fall and is currently screening in only one theater each in Los Angeles and New York. Double-page ads in those newspapers can cost $100,000 to $150,000. Similar ads were run for DreamWorks’ “Gladiator” and “Almost Famous,” two films that opened long enough ago that they are no longer reporting box office grosses.

“If your film is released very early in the year, you have to create a strategy to reinvigorate interest at academy time,” said Terry Curtin, head of publicity at Universal.

“It’s no longer just trade ads,” academy spokesman John Pavlik said. “It’s in the L.A. Times, the New York Times, any publication that could conceivably be seen by voting members of the academy. In that way, it has changed. Each year seems more and more.”

‘Shakespeare’ Wrought Changes

The ante got raised two years ago when Miramax Films walked off with seven Academy Awards, including best picture, for its romantic romp “Shakespeare in Love.” Eyebrows were raised, however, over the aggressive campaign Miramax had waged in the weeks leading up to the ceremony. Not only was the film heavily advertised, but Gwyneth Paltrow, who won the Oscar for best actress, was everywhere at premieres and parties posing for the paparazzi.

Last year, the dark comedy “American Beauty” bagged five Oscars for DreamWorks, including best picture. Kevin Spacey, who won best actor, seemed like a local congressman seeking reelection. He relished the spotlight, attending premieres, holiday parties, and vigorously working the celebrity press circuit.

At the same time, Hilary Swank won the Oscar for best actress for “Boys Don’t Cry,” a searing drama based on a true story of a woman passing as a man who was murdered in a rural Nebraska town. The film had a difficult theme, made only $11.5 million at the domestic box office, and Swank was up against far better-known competition. But the campaign mounted by the studio, Fox Searchlight, managed to get the attention of Oscar voters.

It’s a lesson learned by Paramount Classics, the art house banner of Paramount Pictures, which has been promoting Laura Linney, who stars in the small, critically acclaimed “You Can Count on Me.” Linney has been running neck-and-neck with Julia Roberts (“Erin Brockovich”), being named best actress by the National Society of Film Critics and the New York Film Critics Circle Awards. She also received a Golden Globe nomination as best actress in a drama for her role--but Roberts won that prize.

Linney is the antithesis of a “sound bite” queen, but she has been a trouper promoting the film. “I sort of see it as part of my job,” Linney said. “When you actually love the movie, and the movie is actually bigger than anyone else in it, it makes it so easy.”

Linney has appeared on “The Rosie O’Donnell Show” and dropped in on Charlie Rose with co-star Mark Ruffalo and director Kenneth Lonergan. But Paramount Classics is still waiting to see if she’ll get a coveted booking on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.” Roberts would have no such problems.

Jonathan Norman, who produces “The Charlie Rose Show,” said this is the time of year when studios go all out to get their people on talk shows.

“You get the pre-Golden Globes push, then the after-push if they won and then you are looking at the pre-Oscar push,” Norman said.

Standing Ovation for ‘Crouching Tiger’

Michael Barker, co-president of Sony Pictures Classics, the art house banner of Sony Pictures Entertainment, said the Oscar campaign for director Ang Lee’s “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” began at the Cannes Film Festival last spring. Although not in competition, the Chinese-language fable received a standing ovation.

Barker and Co-President Tom Bernard began strategizing. They set out to get actors Michelle Yeoh and Chow Yun-Fat on the cover of Entertainment Weekly’s Oscar preview issue.

“That is a very prized cover,” Barker said. “We didn’t know until a couple of weeks before that we would get it, but the fact of the matter is, it was a goal.”

Mark Harris, an assistant managing editor at Entertainment Weekly magazine, said Sony Classics had been “beating the drum [on behalf of its film] for a very long time.”

“They knew what they had at the Cannes Film Festival,” Harris said. “They showed it to us very early. I don’t think Entertainment Weekly is unique in that regard. They had the New York press in there on the gamble that it was the kind of movie that would excite good buzz within the media, that people in offices would start talking about it and that would translate into coverage.”

Harris noted that the cover of Entertainment Weekly’s annual Oscar issue has predicted the last two Academy Award-winning films, “Shakespeare in Love” and “American Beauty,” so there was strong competition among studios to make the cover this year.

“It’s fair to say there is a huge amount of pressure from studios and indies to get any kind of cover that has the word ‘Oscar’ on it,” he said.

Studio publicists bring the same intensity to efforts to get stars seen on national television at this time of year. A spokeswoman for the “Today” show noted that Linney, Juliet Binoche of “Chocolat,” Geoffrey Rush of “Quills” and Jamie Bell of “Billy Elliot” have all made appearances on NBC’s early morning program.

Mark Ordesky, president of Fine Line Features, said this year’s Oscar campaigns were “out of the gate” long before the Golden Globe nominations were announced in late December.

“On smaller films, the very essence of their consumer marketing is the start,” he explained. “The minute Bjork won the Palm d’Or at Cannes as best actress [for ‘Dancer in the Dark’] and the ceremony ended, the Oscar campaign [for her] began.” Since then, the avant pop singer/actress from Iceland has been in the September issues of Elle and Vogue as well as on the cover of Flaunt magazine; the October issues of Esquire, Jane, Paper and Premiere magazines as well as the cover of Film Comment; and the November cover of Vanity Fair, which she shared with other musicians.

Ordesky said Oscar campaigns, however, are “ironically a little, teeny-weeny bit higher handed than a political campaign . . . because no matter how persuasive you are on the stump, the work still has to speak for itself. In politics, you can make promises you can’t keep. With a movie, it’s up on the screen or it’s not there.”