How Big a Role Did Politics Play?

In a decision heard around the world, Academy Award voters selected “A Beautiful Mind” as best picture, effectively squelching an apparent smear campaign that accused the filmmakers of omitting potentially embarrassing details about John Forbes Nash Jr., the real-life mathematical genius on whom the haunting biographical drama is based.

Some Oscar voters interviewed this week said that while there is no way to determine how damaged “A Beautiful Mind” was by the negative publicity (the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences keeps the tally a secret) they believe that voters ultimately decided to go with what was on the screen and not off.

“My guess is that most people in the academy felt that the award should be about the finished work,” said producer Tom Pollock, an academy voter and onetime studio chief at Universal Pictures.

“The voters make up their own minds,” said academy voter Paul Mazursky, a director whose credits include “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice” (1969), “Harry and Tonto” (1974) and the 1998 HBO movie “Winchell.”

Mazursky said he paid no attention to the smears being hurled at “A Beautiful Mind,” but he admitted that the resulting controversy impelled him to seek out author Sylvia Nasar’s biography of the same name on which the movie was based.

“I did some investigating about the life of Nash,” Mazursky said. “People who read the book said [the filmmakers] did play around with the facts a little, but I still like the movie. It’s a movie, not the gold standard.”

Although the whisper campaign about “A Beautiful Mind” fizzled as quickly as it took Tom Hanks to unseal the envelope from PricewaterhouseCoopers and announce the winner, Oscar voters and observers of the Academy Awards are worried that the lowbrow political tactics used to sully the picture may have crossed an Oscar Rubicon with potentially dire consequences for the process itself.

“I’m certain the vote was a lot closer when it was finally taken than it would have been three months ago before the controversy,” said Hollywood historian Neal Gabler.

Three months ago, Gabler said, many thought “A Beautiful Mind” could have won in a walk and the film’s star, Russell Crowe, would win best actor as well. As it turned out, Denzel Washington won for best actor for “Training Day.”

“This was the most political of Oscars, both in terms of industry politics and external politics,” Gabler said. “I can’t remember an Oscars--maybe ‘Coming Home’ and ‘The Deer Hunter’ going back to 1978--that was so political. I mean, Julia Roberts, in an interview with Newsweek, was already injecting race into the Oscar race when she said Denzel Washington had to win and if he didn’t win it would be awful. It was a peculiar type of nimbus around this Oscars.”

Despite allegations that filmmakers had omitted from the screenplay that Nash allegedly had homosexual encounters and had uttered anti-Semitic remarks during the years he struggled to overcome schizophrenia, “A Beautiful Mind” basked in a cluster of top honors in Sunday night’s ceremony. Besides best picture and director (Ron Howard), academy voters named Jennifer Connelly best supporting actress and honored Akiva Goldsman for his adapted screenplay. Only Crowe, the brooding and talented New Zealand-born actor, failed to win, and some believed he shot himself in the foot because of reports of boorish behavior in the waning days of the Oscar race.

Director Mazursky said that for a smear campaign to work, it assumes that the Oscar voters would have seen the film and come away undecided.

“I just vote for what I think should win,” he said, noting that he even avoids reading the massive number of Oscar campaign ads that studios run in Hollywood’s major trade publications, Variety and the Hollywood Reporter, to tout their Oscar nominees.

Mazursky doubts those ads have much influence on Oscar voters and noted that when Art Carney won the Oscar for best actor in “Harry and Tonto,” the studios did little in the way of campaigning for him. Carney won over stiff competition from Dustin Hoffman in “Lenny,” Jack Nicholson in “Chinatown,” Al Pacino in “The Godfather, Part II” and Albert Finney in “Murder on the Orient Express.”

The Oscar vote, Mazursky said, “is more honest than people think. If there was any lack of honesty, studios would ask their people to vote for their picture. I don’t think that happens very much. I really don’t.”

Director Mark Rydell (“On Golden Pond”) said as an Oscar voter he disregarded the attacks on “A Beautiful Mind” because he was convinced that schizophrenic Nash’s purported anti-Semitic remarks came “when he was completely out of his head.”

Rydell said he thought the alleged whisper campaign against the movie, involving leaks to the press about events in Nash’s life that weren’t in the film, was just “a lot of smoke. I find it hard to believe, and I prefer not to believe it.”

Besides, he stressed, Howard and his filmmaking team had not set out to make a documentary of Nash, but a feature film. “I thought it was one of the most insightful exhibitions of schizophrenia ever made,” Rydell said. “It asked what is it like to be deluded like that. You weren’t just told it, you saw it.”

Glenn Kenny, senior editor at Premiere magazine, called the whisper campaign “grotesque and lamentable” but ultimately ineffectual.

“It caused nothing but a lot of hostility toward the people who were perceived to be instigating it,” Kenny said.

One question hovering over the “Beautiful Mind” Oscar campaign was whether best actor nominee Crowe’s chances were hurt by the accusations against Nash. While many praised Crowe’s on-screen performance, it was his off-screen behavior that may have tipped the scales to winner Washington.

Gabler believes Crowe’s chances were hurt by a combination of factors that included a recent public incident at the British film awards in which the actor angrily confronted the show’s producer and berated him for having deleted from the telecast some of Crowe’s comments in his acceptance speech. Gabler felt Crowe also was hurt by the Nash controversy and the racial factor.

“There was a statement being made in Denzel Washington being voted over Crowe,” Gabler said. “One of the interesting things about the broadcast is that in the guise of being forward-thinking about race, it actually turned out to be backward-thinking about race, because the great to-do made about the fact that two African American actors [Washington and Halle Berry] won best actor and actress only shows you how little we had advanced--and it was not that far.”

Crowe has garnered a bad-boy reputation as a macho ladies’ man who breaks hearts as easily as he memorizes dialogue. His messy affair with actress Meg Ryan was just one example.

“I think the only thing that was clearly evident [in the academy vote] was the real antipathy toward Russell Crowe,” said entertainment attorney Eric Weissmann, a nonvoting member of the academy. “When you consider the fact that Jennifer Connelly won--and I don’t mean to denigrate her role, but she just played his wife--and that she would get it and the picture and director would get it, but the main actor on whom the entire movie rests gets nothing. That is a very strong statement. I think people just turned away from him.”

Added Rydell: “I think Russell Crowe did himself some harm by behaving in a less than attractive fashion. But I also think Denzel Washington deserved the award. He gave an absolutely stunning performance.”

The debate over “A Beautiful Mind” will linger for years, many believe, and could prove unsettling for Hollywood in the long run, should filmmakers now shy away from making biopics for fear of being placed in the media’s interrogation chair.

“I think, in the future, when people are thinking about using biopics, they’ll be more cautious on how they use the facts,” Gabler said. “I happen to think this is a tragedy. To think we have this new chilling effect. That artists are going to have to be bound by facts.