Oscar Fever Is Pushing the Envelope of Civility

As the Academy Awards race heads into the final stretch, the campaign for best picture has turned increasingly nasty, much of it centered on an alleged smear campaign against best picture nominee “A Beautiful Mind.”

The Universal Pictures film, an early favorite to win Oscar’s top prize, has been under attack by what the studio says are cheap shots, falsehoods and innuendo designed to sway academy voters.

Behind the scenes, in a flurry of phone calls and e-mails, studios have been accusing one another of spreading damaging stories to the entertainment media. Those accused include 20th Century Fox, which is promoting its best picture nominee, “Moulin Rouge,” and Miramax, which is promoting “In the Bedroom” for the top award. Both studios vigorously deny the allegations. Voting for the Academy Awards ends Tuesday.

This year’s Oscar campaigning has been so nasty that it has invoked comparisons with some of the nation’s most infamous political campaigns, including Richard M. Nixon’s “dirty tricks”’ and the tactics used by the late Republican strategist Lee Atwater to help George Bush defeat Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis in 1988.

“It’s no longer a whisper campaign; it’s more a yelling campaign,” said Terry Press, marketing chief for DreamWorks, which owns the foreign rights to “A Beautiful Mind.” “I feel every day like we all need to take a shower, and I don’t want to feel that way.”

Among the reasons cited for the intensity of the campaign are the heightened influence of the Internet and the mainstream media’s increasing tendency to mine it for stories; the millions of dollars at stake for the studios, which profit mightily from an Academy Award; and the rabid competition to win the best picture title. Universal, in particular, has waged an aggressive, expensive campaign to promote the Oscar chances of “A Beautiful Mind,” including color inserts in home-delivered editions of the Los Angeles Times.

“The first time this happens [next year], whoever is being attacked should put their foot down and say, ‘Not again,’ ” said Terry Curtin, who heads publicity at Universal. “Everybody has participated in letting it get too far.”

For those outside Hollywood, the Academy Awards would seem to be a time of celebration, when the industry honors its own in a glamorous event viewed by a worldwide audience. But to the studios, it has become an increasingly serious business as Oscar ad campaigns have grown more expensive and the financial implications of the awards have risen.

Many Hollywood observers trace the growing nastiness to the 1998 best picture battle between Miramax (“Shakespeare in Love”) and DreamWorks (“Saving Private Ryan”)--a battle won by Miramax at great cost.

Jeffrey Godsick, vice president of domestic marketing for Fox, said the responsibility is shared by the Internet, the media that cover entertainment and the dozens of groups that give out awards.

“The reality is that for anything to change, it’s going to have to be self-policed,” Godsick said. “Maybe that is the evolution that will come out of this year. Maybe people will learn from this.”

This year’s campaign turned ugly around the time of the Golden Globe nominations in December. Reporters were alerted by a Miramax Oscar consultant about a Matt Drudge piece stating that scenes from Sylvia Nasar’s book “A Beautiful Mind” involving its subject, John Nash, and his alleged homosexual liaisons, had been taken out of the movie.

Mainstream media critics had previously accused “A Beautiful Mind” of being flawed, saying the filmmakers had left out many aspects of Nash’s life to make the movie more palatable and dramatic. Indeed, the film takes such liberties with certain facts that the studio describes it only as being “inspired by” Nash’s life.

The situation is reminiscent of the sinking Oscar chances for Universal’s 1999 film “The Hurricane.” Makers of that movie were accused of watering down and changing the facts of the story to enhance their film. The studio learned from the debacle and responded forcefully to allegations of inaccuracy in “A Beautiful Mind.”

Despite Universal’s efforts, Internet writers like Drudge, FoxNews.com columnist Roger Friedman, Jeffrey Wells at reel.com, various Internet Oscar sites and journalists from the New York Post, the Times of London, Entertainment Weekly and other outlets continued to refer to what Universal called unsubstantiated claims about Nash’s personal life.

The situation reached a crescendo in late February, however, when Drudge and the New York Post, quoting a 1967 letter Nash wrote, called the mathematician “a rabid anti-Semite.” What was left out of context was that Nash was suffering through a bout with paranoid schizophrenia when he wrote the letter.

Attacks on Nash Draw Heated Response

The effort to paint Nash as an anti-Semite was seen by many in Hollywood as a flagrant attempt to discredit “A Beautiful Mind” with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ many Jewish members (the academy does not do a demographic breakdown of its membership). Before Universal could respond, the hosts of the popular ABC daytime show “The View” were commenting on how Nash’s anti-Semitic views should have been included in the movie. Suddenly, talk radio was telling listeners to call in with their votes on whether Nash was anti-Semitic or not.

Universal went on the counter-attack. “Beautiful Mind” director Ron Howard said that he took the accusations against Nash personally and felt that the Nobel Prize-winning professor’s reputation was being unfairly tarnished--sentiments echoed last week by Universal Pictures Chairwoman Stacey Snider in the Hollywood Reporter. At an academy nominee luncheon in Beverly Hills, usually a celebratory affair, Howard compared the anti-”Beautiful Mind” campaign to smears against the Dukakis campaign in 1988.

In an op-ed piece this week for The Times, author Nasar tried to set the record straight on Nash’s personal life. She concluded that most journalists were interested in hearing “tabloid fare.” Movie critic Roger Ebert wrote a column defending “A Beautiful Mind,” calling “the mugging of this film . . . the most disturbing element of this year’s Oscar race.” On Sunday, in an interview on CBS’ “60 Minutes,” Nash will reportedly say allegations that he is homosexual and anti-Semitic are untrue.

Miramax Co-Chairman Harvey Weinstein, whose studio has often been at the heart of cutthroat Oscar competition, tried to distance himself from the fray by knocking on “A Beautiful Mind” star Russell Crowe’s hotel door in Los Angeles after the Oscar luncheon and showing him his academy ballot, saying he would vote for Howard for best director. (Of course, Miramax does not have a competitor in this category.)

“In the midst of the campaign things tend to seem more intense, but it does seem like the volume has been raised this year,” said Matthew Hiltzik, a spokesman for Miramax. “We have a great relationship with Universal, and we share their disappointment at this nonsense taking away from a great film like ‘A Beautiful Mind.’ ”

If anything, this year’s campaign illustrates the enormous power the Internet and tabloid journalism have amassed over the last five years, observers say. And it is not exclusive to Hollywood’s Oscar campaigns.

“One would be hard pressed to say that winning the Academy Awards is analogous to electing the person that will be the leader of the free world, but in everything we find that the printed word has been cheapened,” said California Democratic political consultant Kam Kuwata. “There was a time when people would distinguish between Walter Cronkite and a National Enquirer. Those lines are being blurred, and that is a very dangerous situation in anything.”

Indeed, as Nasar stated in her Times article, when she spoke before a group of students at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, they asked her about the Oscar campaign and the more titillating aspects of Nash’s life, not about his Nobel Prize or his groundbreaking math theories.

Winning Can Mean Millions of Dollars

Winning an Oscar--or an Oscar nomination--means millions of dollars for a picture. The biggest gains come from what is called the ancillary markets--DVD, home video and international sales. For example, “Moulin Rouge’s” DVD sales went up 160% the week of the nomination, and it has taken in more than $2 million in the month and a half since its release--nearly 30% above projections, Godsick said.

Reforming the system will be difficult. For one thing, studio Oscar advertising in Hollywood trade papers and consumer publications such as the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times has skyrocketed in recent years, with estimates of a 20% increase this year alone.

Legally, the academy cannot put a cap on spending because it would immediately be slapped with a restraint-of-trade lawsuit, said academy Executive Director Bruce Davis. Ultimately, it is the studios that must pull in the reins on one another, he said.

This year’s campaign has been a source of irritation for longtime members of the academy, such as publicist Johnny Friedkin. His anger over the amount of money spent on advertising and negative campaigning has been building in recent years, he said.

“I’m very depressed,” said Friedkin, a member of the academy for 30 years. “There is enough smog in the air without all the [nonsense] that is being thrown out there. [But] I don’t think it matters. I think it’s the picture and the performance that win in the end. Part of the game is to get them to watch the cassette and then,” he said, paraphrasing former Clinton aide James Carville, “. . . It’s the picture, stupid.”