Oscar, Harvey are seeing eye to eye

Harvey Weinstein has a secret weapon. For all of his unpopularity in Hollywood, his personal taste turns out to almost exactly mirror that of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Weinstein is not holding his nose with one hand and beating the drum with the other, trying to flog interest in product he’s indifferent to. The Miramax Films co-chairman has the good fortune of being willing to make, and being genuinely passionate about, the kinds of films that appeal to Oscar voters and can be readily sold to them at awards season.

This year, Weinstein’s and the academy’s tastes coincided to a degree remarkable even for him.

The top three nomination accumulators -- “Chicago” with 13, “Gangs of New York” with 10 and “The Hours” (a coproduction with Paramount and Scott Rudin) with nine -- all had the Miramax name on them.

When you add in “Frida” with six nominations, “The Quiet American” with one and the Chinese “Hero,” one of the foreign language choices, that’s 40 nominations -- even more impressive compared with the Warner Bros. grand total of exactly one-half a nomination (sharing the makeup nod on “The Time Machine” with DreamWorks.)

This year’s Miramax nominations were especially notable because they illuminated exactly what kinds of films fit both the Weinstein and the academy models.

“Chicago,” for instance, is an example of the kind of smartly made mass audience crowd-pleaser that ought to be Hollywood’s bread and butter but has become an increasingly rare event.

This is the sort of movie that any studio would have been happy to have once it was made, but most studios -- addicted to the rush of catering to the under-25 audience -- have so lost touch with what adults want, they likely would not have put money into it. Miramax was willing to bet that what had gone away was not America’s taste for musicals (witness “Moulin Rouge”) but Hollywood’s interest and ability to put a lively and involving example of the genre on the screen.

“The Hours” is a case in point of another kind of film that Hollywood admires in the abstract but is loath to finance. Literary, emotional, artistic, more concerned with affairs of the heart and mind that mindless explosions, its Oscar potential is matched by its commercial riskiness. Yet it’s precisely this element of danger linked to quality that seems to always attract Weinstein, who backed “The English Patient” when major studios backed away.

If Miramax supports genuinely artistic films, it also gets behind one of the academy’s perennial weaknesses: fake art, or, more to the point, films that can be sold as art.

“Frida” certainly fits this category: its high craft level and its swooning pretensions help disguise the fact that it’s virtually indistinguishable from the standard-issue studio biopics of decades past.

Fitting this fake art category even more exactly is “Gangs,” a textbook example of a conceited film that can, with enough time and money and nonstop advertising and publicity, be sold as something it is not, namely a substantial motion picture.

It has all the ingredients it should have to be successful, and from a sales point of view that’s all that matters.

When you’re selling, it’s more important that Martin Scorsese can be pointed to as a lionized director than that this is one of his least successful works. It matters more that respected screenwriters Steve Zaillian and Kenneth Lonergan have worked on your script than that the actual product is inferior.

And when you have a film with bought-and-paid-for visuals, you simply ignore William Goldman’s savage attack in a recent Weekly Variety, where he said, “Please do not sputter on about some of the visuals -- my God, bring Ed Wood back from the dead, give him a hundred mil-plus to play with, he’d give you some visuals, too.”

Now that “Gangs of New York” has successfully risen above its station, one of the interesting questions of the Oscar race becomes how far it can go -- but it is not the only one. Especially in the less gaudy categories, some fascinating battles are shaping up.

The best animation race, for instance, will likely come down to a pair of wonderful but very different films, both distributed by Disney: “Lilo & Stitch” and “Spirited Away.” The documentary contest may also come down to two equally different contenders: Michael Moore’s ferociously political “Bowling for Columbine” and “Winged Migration,” a French nature documentary that has been lavishly praised in Europe.

The most interesting race might be the foreign language race, where five widely divergent films will be squaring off.

There is a melodrama from Mexico (“El Crimen del Padre Amaro”), an action epic from China (“Hero”), an emotional family story from Germany (“Nowhere in Africa”), a comedy from the Netherlands (“Zus & Zo”) and the usual unclassifiable film from Finland’s Aki Kourismaki (“The Man Without a Past”). Only one of these films has the Miramax name on it, but this is one category where that might not be enough.