Interpreting Academy’s Cold Shoulder

You can bet everyone in Hollywood is debating how to read the Academy’s refusal to give a best picture nomination to Miramax’s “Cold Mountain,” freezing the studio out of Best Picture contention for the first time in 11 years. Is it a true commentary on the film’s merits or -- gasp -- payback for Miramax kingpin Harvey Weinstein’s brass-knuckled Oscar campaigning in recent years?

Neither, if you ask Weinstein. “If the academy was mad at us, we’d never have gotten 15 nominations today, more than anyone else,” he said Tuesday. “It was a complete affirmation for the kind of pictures we’re involved with.”

Perhaps so. But no matter how you slice it, it’s been a bad couple of weeks for Weinstein. He ended up playing the heavy in “Down and Dirty Pictures,” Peter Biskind’s lacerating history of the independent film movement, which has been the lunchtime talk of Hollywood in recent days.

The book depicts Weinstein as a bully and vulgarian whose path to success has left a trail of disaffected filmmakers in his wake. Miramax had just one film playing at the Sundance Film Festival, a film market in which the studio normally has a dominating presence. Miramax was nearly shut out at the Golden Globe Awards Sunday night and was such a non-factor at the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn. awards, held Monday night, that no one from the studio bothered to stay for the ceremony.

But for Miramax, the worst insult of all has to be the spectacular showing of “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King,” which earned 11 Oscar nominations and seems poised to run the table on Oscar night. As “Lord of the Rings” director Peter Jackson slyly noted at the L.A. Film Critics awards Monday, Weinstein owned the rights to make the stunning trilogy, but let the films go to New Line, which now has all the bragging rights (though Weinstein retains an executive producer credit and a tidy chunk of the profits).

In Hollywood, a town where Weinstein has few friends and many rivals, speculation is rampant that the stodgy old academy has finally taken its revenge on Miramax for the studio’s rough-and-tumble Oscar gamesmanship. Though its production and marketing prowess has won the studio many awards -- Miramax so dominated last year that The Times’ Oscar nomination day headline read: “The Harveys” -- it also has played a key role in transforming the once-stately Oscar competition into a high-priced demolition derby.

It is a poorly kept secret that the academy has little love for the Miramaxification of the Oscar race, which is dominated by costly advertising campaigns, teams of crafty Oscar consultants and questionable campaign tactics, as in last year’s Robert Wise endorsement of “Gangs of New York” director Martin Scorsese, which turned out to have been penned by a Miramax Oscar publicist.

But perhaps it’s better to read the surprising rejection of “Cold Mountain” as less of a commentary on Miramax’s Oscar tactics than as a rejection of its Oscar business plan. For years, Miramax has used the Academy Awards as its prime marketing tool, releasing its most important film at year’s end, using the subsequent hoopla from various awards and Oscar nominations to draw mainstream moviegoers into theaters.

For Miramax, success bred success, but it also has inspired a wealth of imitation, as virtually every studio routinely releases its Oscar picture at year’s end, using the backdraft of nomination buzz to push films to new box-office heights. This year, perhaps because the controversy over awards “screener” tapes made it difficult for many voters to see the glut of films on hand, the strategy didn’t work as smoothly, something Weinstein acknowledges.

“If I had to do ‘Cold Mountain’ all over again, I’d release the damn movie in October,” he said. “It was complete suicide to open the movie at Christmas. We thought we could pull it off, and we were wrong. Except for ‘Lord of the Rings,’ which everyone already knew well, none of the best picture nominees were released after Nov. 14. There just wasn’t enough time for voters to see ‘Cold Mountain’ on the big screen. That didn’t happen with our other films.”

In addition to hearing Weinstein admit a mistake, the big shocker Tuesday was seeing the academy give four nominations to “City of God,” a searing Brazilian drama that was ignored last year when it was eligible for best foreign film. (A rule modification allowed the movie to compete again in 2003, when it was released in the United States.)

Give Weinstein credit. When we had breakfast in New York last year, long after most executives would’ve abandoned “City of God,” he was still trying to cajole me into writing a story about it. Miramax’s other art films also did well Tuesday, with “The Barbarian Invasions” earning two nominations and “Dirty Pretty Things” scoring a best original screenplay nod. Miramax also has two of the five nominees up for best foreign film.

If I were running Miramax, here’s how I would read the academy’s message: Give us a break from grand, high-priced star vehicles like “Cold Mountain.” In an era where the big studios care more about merchandising action toys than making movies, it’s time that Weinstein, the last great Svengali of quality films, went back to doing what he did best -- being a feisty underdog, not Hollywood’s playground bully.