Small Attitudes, Big Money Point to the Need for Reform

The best thing I can say about this year’s Oscar race is that at least no one demanded a recount. It may have been close, but “Gladiator” won fair and square--there were no hanging chads, no befuddled elderly voters, no gassy cable news show posturing.

Still, this was a lackluster year for the Oscars, and not just because the films up for best foreign-language film easily outclassed several of the films nominated for best picture. What really made it a bad year was that the Academy Awards lost the one thing that the Golden Globes, the People’s Choice Awards and the Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics Awards will never have--they lost their dignity. To restore it is going to take some dramatic action, way beyond the gentle measures taken by the academy.

This was the year the glamour of the Oscars was eclipsed by the grunge of the Oscar race. There are now so many pseudo award events leading up to the Oscars--all covered by the media as if they were major medical breakthroughs--that the Oscars have the anticlimactic feel of a golf tournament in which Tiger Woods has a 10-stroke lead going into the final round. When I saw “You Can Count on Me” director Kenneth Lonergan’s publicist at the Broadcast Film Critics Awards earlier in the year, he said that whenever he called his client, Lonergan would say: “What have we won today?”

This was also a year in which the Oscar’s stature was undercut by best picture campaigns marred by media manipulation, rule-bending publicity stunts and major-league back-stabbing. There was so much enmity between Miramax (the studio behind “Chocolat”) and Sony Pictures Classics (the studio behind “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”) that when Miramax czar Harvey Weinstein ran into Sony’s co-chief Tom Bernard at a post-Golden Globes party, a brawl nearly broke out.

Insult and invective were the rule. It was only a few short years ago that the Oscars had a soothing gravitas, like watching Charles Kuralt do the Sunday morning news. Now the awards race has the pugnacious, smash-mouth roar of Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly. Oscar publicists ratted out rival movies, studio chiefs bad-mouthed opposing films, two film companies were wrist-slapped by the academy for rule-breaking while others got away with truth-stretching advertising. It hardly seems coincidental that “Gladiator,” the movie that won the most statuettes, was also the movie with the most lavish, image-conscious marketing campaign.

For me, the churlish tone was set at the Los Angeles Film Critics Awards in January. Julia Roberts, having won the best actress trophy for her brassy performance in “Erin Brockovich,” gave a wickedly funny acceptance speech that was considerably raunchier than her Oscar speech Sunday night. When she finished, the studio executive seated next to me--who, of course, was backing a rival film--leaned over and hissed: “I wonder who wrote that speech.”

So what’s gone wrong? In short, the Oscars have fallen prisoner to the same forces that dominate the movie business the rest of the year--the reliance on multimillion-dollar marketing campaigns. Miramax took great umbrage when I dismissed its best picture nomination for “Chocolat” as a triumph of marketing. But I would argue that DreamWorks’ transformation of “Gladiator” from a summer popcorn movie to best picture winner was also a victory of advertising over artistry. When Entertainment Weekly, whose motto should be “All Oscars All the Time,” does its annual ranking of the best Oscar winners of all time, “Gladiator” will no doubt be near the bottom, rubbing elbows with “Oliver!” and “Around the World in 80 Days.”

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Marketing is the muscle in today’s movie business. It was only a matter of time before studios figured out that the same techniques they use to promote thrillers and youth comedies could work with Oscar voters too. For teenagers, the studios sell sex and snotty humor; with Oscar voters--suckers for seriousness and British accents--the studios emphasize pomp and circumstance.

“Chocolat” was a lightweight romance that Miramax reinvented as a touching fable of tolerance. The studio screened the movie at the United Nations; afterward the Rev. Jesse Jackson said the movie was “really about us going to Birmingham to get the right to vote.” Miramax then ran an ad quoting the Anti-Defamation League’s Abraham Foxman, who praised the film for addressing prejudice and tolerance in a sensitive manner.

If these whoppers weren’t enough, the studio then ran ads saying critics and audiences “are unanimous--’Chocolat’ is one of the year’s best pictures.” It was a great way of persuading Oscar voters that the film had cinematic heft, but Miramax had to pull the ads after the Wall Street Journal pointed out that the movie only appeared on 10 critics’ Top 10 lists--as compared to 175 for “Traffic.”

Miramax was hardly alone. Last March, when “Erin Brockovich” was being marketed to general audiences, every ad showed Julia Roberts’ breasts bursting out of her skimpy dresses. During Oscar season, the Julia we saw in ad photos suddenly had a lot less cleavage. DreamWorks went even further retooling “Gladiator.” When the film was released last summer, the studio’s lead critics’ blurb called the film “a colossus of rousing action and ferocious fun!” But during Oscar season the film’s ads dropped the swordplay and stressed its epic heroism and award-winning honors.

Are Oscar voters really influenced by all this flimflam? Academy officials say no. But I say yes. Studios spring for big-money ad campaigns for the same reason politicians do--it works.

This year, everybody pulled out all the stops. Up for best supporting actor for “Shadow of the Vampire,” Willem Dafoe campaigned for votes at the Motion Picture Retirement Home. Jack Nicholson, an old pal of “Before Night Falls” director Julian Schnabel, hosted a party for Javier Bardem, who was up for best actor for his role in Schnabel’s film. Sony Classics screened “Crouching Tiger” for casts and crews, presumably populated with academy members, on 20 film locations.

DreamWorks had a weeklong series of “Gladiator” screenings in Century City with a different nominated star or craftsman from the film on hand each night.

The studios also worked the press nonstop. Washington has its political consultants. Hollywood has an elite corps of Oscar spin doctors hired to do just what their political brethren do--talk up their candidates and poor-mouth the competition. “Croupier,” a film beloved by many critics, was disqualified early on after an Oscar publicist blew the whistle on the fact that it had aired once on Dutch television more than a year before its official qualifying run here.

The tattletale tactics often worked. One day an Oscar publicist phoned around town with the news that Universal Pictures had sent a DVD about the making of “Erin Brockovich” to all Variety subscribers--figuring it would reach a lot of academy voters. The next day the news broke on Inside.com and other Hollywood-oriented Web outlets.

One of the few studios to hold its tongue was 20th Century Fox, which ran such a feeble best actor campaign for Tom Hanks that when rival publicists called around, unfairly dismissing his role as actor’s trickery, Fox’s publicity team was powerless to respond. Having given an inspired performance free of the scenery-chewing histrionics so often rewarded at Oscar time, Hanks deserved better. So did the Oscars.

So what can the academy do to save its awards from more chicanery? First off, the academy should take its cue from Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who is trying to pass a campaign reform bill that would do for presidential politics what the academy should do for Oscar politics--rein in the big spenders.

The academy has a big fat rule book governing all sorts of specific behavior and submission deadlines. So let’s add a simple new clause that would impose a ceiling on studio spending, say $100,000 per movie during the initial nomination period and an additional $100,000 for the five nominated finalists. It would mean a lot less advertising income for the trade papers--and this newspaper as well--but it would create a far more level playing field and restore some much-needed honor to Oscar season.

Second, the academy needs to put some teeth into its penalty clauses. If the academy can disqualify “Croupier” for one airing on Dutch TV, then surely it can do more than wrist-slap studios by taking away four Oscar night tickets for marketing infractions. Why not tell studios that if they break a rule, their films are disqualified. No debate, no second chances. I guarantee it will inspire the world’s most squeaky-clean Oscar campaign.

When I watched the Oscars as a kid, the awards seemed like a paragon of class, high style and good behavior--it was the one night when every Hollywood schlepper looked a little bit like Cary Grant. Too much of that elegance was missing in action this year. Call me a dreamer, but I think Oscar looks tacky dressed in a T-shirt and baggy shorts. It’s time for the academy to insist on black-tie behavior.

“The Big Picture” runs every Tuesday in Calendar. If you have comments, ideas or criticism, e-mail them to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.

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Beyond the Shrine

* Gushers and gushees find one another at post-Oscar parties. E2