Consider This from NPR - How Do You Win An Oscar? It's More Complicated Than You Think

Episode Date: January 26, 2024

A look behind the curtain at the Oscar campaign machine and what it takes to bring home the gold.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

At the 96th Oscars nomination announcements, actors Zach Wade and Zazie Beetz set a positive tone. For anyone in the film industry, no matter where you're from, to be recognized by the Academy is a dream come true. To be nominated can be life changing. But the Oscar nominations can be messy. Almost every year, off-screen drama pops up about something, often about who did or didn't get nominated. This year was no exception. Hi was the biggest movie of 2023, and it wound up with a very respectable eight Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. Two nominations it didn't get, Best Director for Greta Gerwig, and Best Actress for Barbie herself, Margot Robbie.

Outrage poured across social media and adding insult to injury? But it's Barbie and Ken. There is no just Ken. Ryan Gosling proved enough for the Academy, getting the nod for Best Supporting Actor. Now, Robbie did receive a nomination as a producer for Barbie, and Gerwig was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay, but fans were not appeased. Even Hillary Clinton chimed in on X, formerly known as Twitter. But Oscar pundits say the Barbie snubs weren't totally unexpected. The Academy does not have a great history with comedy, and I think the Margot Robbie performance was classified as that. It does not have a great history with comedy. And I think the Margot Robbie performance was classified as that. It does not have a great history with IP.

It does not have an illustrious history with female directors or stories centered around women. So there were a lot of things here that seemed like they could break the wrong way. Amanda Dobbins co-hosts the movie podcast The Big Picture for the website The Ringer with Sean Fennessey. 2023 was an exceptional year for movies. So when you start looking down the list of what got in and what did not, it's harder than usual to say,

well, we got to take this movie out. The machinery behind getting an Oscar nomination can feel like a giant mystery, befitting a voting body with over 10,500 members representing LA's biggest and most close-knit industry. I always like to joke that it's one of the last true public secret cabals of America. We never see any voting results about anything ever. Consider this. Most of us have no idea what it takes to get nominated, let alone actually walk away with an actual Oscar. But behind every

successful nomination, there's a small army of people we never hear about working very hard to impress the voting members of the Academy. Coming up for your consideration, how to win an Oscar. From NPR, I'm Scott Detrow. It's Friday, January 26th. It's Consider This from NPR. You've probably been hearing a lot about what's been happening in the 2024 presidential campaign. Well, we want to pivot to a different kind of campaign that might be just as aggressive. Oscar campaigns. Studios drop piles of cash to get their movies and stars seen in the hopes that it may lead to Oscar gold.

To find out what goes on behind the Oscars, I called Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins. They co-host the big picture podcast for the website The Ringer. And they follow the intricacies of the Oscar campaigns year in and year out. I asked them just what goes in to an Oscar campaign. It's a long list. It's an entire strategy. It's an entire industry that is hundreds, thousands of people work in this industry and it is a huge part of the lifeblood of the movie industry,

I think in a kind of a hidden way that many people don't totally understand. There's something very important in Hollywood called for your consideration. It's a massive industry powered by publicists and marketeers who are responsible for getting films in front of people at film festivals, organizing screenings for guild members, creating parties after those screenings to create awareness, and then building entire campaigns after the receptions of those movies and getting the famous people in front of the world so that they know that they should or could be nominated for these various awards. It's a nine-month job story thing that we spend nine months on our show covering all the time. And it's very elaborate and arcane and in some ways very silly and ridiculous. But it still is essential, I feel like, to the process of getting nominated. In addition to all those parties and events, you get a more public-facing thing, too. You get ads here in Los Angeles. You get

billboards, which are just everywhere and often seem strategically placed according to where voters or other influential personalities live. You get their press appearances, and especially for films with movie stars and or notable names. They just show up everywhere all of the time. And I want to ask about that because like, let's think about people who are nominated. Like, let's think about a Lily Gladstone or a Ryan Gosling, right? Or somebody like that.

If you're up for an award right now, are you doing press to try and generate broader buzz? Or are you going on like hot ones or whatever, hoping that like one academy voter might happen to catch it and think about you a little bit more i think it really depends on the nominee in the case of ryan gosling i would not expect him to do very much press to promote now there's a couple of reasons for that one of which is the fact that margot robbie and and gretta gerwig are not nominated that's a factor but also because he is extraordinarily

famous and successful and does not need to campaign a factor but also because he is extraordinarily famous and successful and does not need to campaign aggressively for his award because people know who he is and barbie was a sensation in the case of i don't know who's someone who we think will definitely be campaigning hard this year daniel brooks maybe from the color purple you seem like trouble i come here out of respect but if there ain't nothing to get that show ain't nothing again who is a less well-known name who had a standout role in that movie which is otherwise not nominated at this academy awards that's someone who you may see on jimmy kimmel or on an internet talk show like hot ones or on a podcast like the one that we host. So it really is dependent entirely,

I think, on the profile of the film and the profile of the performer. I think we unfortunately have to very briefly talk about Harvey Weinstein, who's of course since disgraced and in prison right now for rape and sexual assault. But he was often credited as the inventor of the modern Oscar campaign. I mean, was there anything specifically that he and his studio did that was markedly different in like the Shakespeare in Love era when this started to kind of become the way that you go about trying to win these awards?

From my vantage point, there were two critical things that he did. One was he was very gifted persuader of voters by creating like eventizing films that otherwise would not be classically deemed awards movies he was able to pit smaller films like shakespeare in love against bigger films like saving private ryan and play a kind of david versus goliath card and engender a kind of sympathy from voters about the way that you know big studios had a lot of opportunity and

resources and power and he was running this very small shop that was interested in world cinema and if you look at the work that is produced at Miramax you'll see that the true heart of cinema lies in these stories now obviously what he did in his private life is heinous and frankly what you hear behind the scenes about the way that he campaigned his movies he also acted terribly at times and lied about his competitors and lied about his own films. And he, of course, was very involved in the editing and cutting of the movies as well and often took opportunities away from artists. And so he was a very bad actor, but he did all those things. And then also, he was kind of an architect of a sort of swift boating of other movies, the way that he would kind of create disinformation campaigns around the movies that they were competing against. So this was a very nasty period.

Absolutely. There's a great recent book by Michael Shulman called Oscar Wars that does the whole history of the Academy Awards, but it really focuses on that Shakespeare in Love versus Saving Private Ryan year that you mentioned as kind of the turning point and certainly the introduction of Weinstein's campaign tactics and ugliness. And what I had forgotten was the extent to which that was even a narrative at the time. And it became also just a meta story about Weinstein and Miramax versus Spielberg and DreamWorks and influence on the press. And can you buy an Oscar, which was very much in the conversation in 1998, 1999. So he is certainly identified with that. Another funny thing is all of the different rule changes that the Academy institutes in response to things that Harvey Weinstein did. And they're like, well, no, actually, you can't have all of these people at a fancy dinner together with only

Academy voters. It's just, and it's like a constant game of catch of, well, Harvey did this, and now we need to outrule it. We saw this last year with the campaign for 2Leslie and the way that we heard about rules that were violated in an effort to support Andrea Risborough's performance. A lot of those rules were created because of what Amanda is citing, which is that Harvey Weinstein was effectively bribing Academy members by creating opportunities for them to have great experiences so that they would then like him and vote for his films. Yeah.

And this, this situation last year was, was this interesting moment where this was a low budget film that it seemed like hardly anybody saw, but there was this very well organized this was a low-budget film that it seemed like hardly anybody saw. But there was this very well-organized by a handful of people grassroots, in quotes, campaign to get Andrea Riceboro a nomination where you saw all these posts all of a sudden from famous people kind of arguing for her. She ends up getting nominated and it just became an entire thing. This is something that happens, though. I mean, there's a way to do this that is much more sanctioned versus unsanctioned. What we saw

last year, these kind of private events at people's homes is unsanctioned, but we see now all the time, very famous actors, for example, Jennifer Aniston co-stars with Greta Lee on the morning show, They're Friends. So Jennifer Aniston moderated Q and A's after screenings of past lives to support her friend Greta Lee in front of a public audience, often of Screen Actors Guild members or Academy members. That's just within the bylaws. Now, if you step back 10 feet and say, why does the Academy Awards need bylaws? Fair question. It's a silly made-up award show.

But it's because people like Harvey Weinstein insinuated themselves into the industry over time and stretched immensely to break those rules there was something about the two Leslie affair that in the moment I just thought well why hasn't anyone done this before it was a little ingenious and I say that as someone who just again I'm a millennial woman so I follow Gwyneth Paltrow on Instagram and I just watched it roll out over time. That is the thing that is important to note. This is unverifiable, of course, but this has been happening since those rules were created. There are these parties and these get togethers. This is an industry of friends.

This is an industry of connectivity. So the difference is, is that now we have social media. So when you have a party, if someone accidentally takes a photo of a party supporting someone like Andrea Risborough, it can find its way to the internet and then everyone can become aware of it. This no longer really can operate in the shadows in the way that it once did. So the Academy has to be more stringent in the way that they police these things. To end, is there any anything else that that you think is worth flagging about dark horses or about how the next few weeks will play out? Anything that can make somebody feel kind of smart and in the know if they want to, you know,

pass it off as their own observation. What's your dark horse? Justine Triet. Justine Triet is the writer-director of Anatomy of a Fall, which is a wonderful French film that was nominated for Best Picture. Justine Triet was nominated for Best Director.

She was nominated for Original Screenplay. The star Sandra Huller was nominated for Best Actress. She could definitely win in Best Original Screenplay. And she's another person who gives a great speech. She gave two at the Golden Globes, Fantastic, Blouse, and Jacket. Not that that matters, but also in awards season, it does matter. So if you haven't seen Anatomy Will Fall, I would check it out because I think there is sort of just a continuing groundswell of support for that movie. I don't know that it'll take home the big prize, but she might be on stage. This is less of a dark horse, but I think the most interesting race this year is Best Actress between Lily Gladstone in Killers of the Flower Moon and Emma Stone in Poor Things. I am Bella Baxter, and there is a world to enjoy.

Circumnavigate. It is the goal of all to progress, grow. A woman. A winner previously, beloved in the community, I think widely considered one of the signature stars of her generation, and Lily Gladstone, the first ever Native American actress from the United States to be nominated for Best Actress. Storm, it's powerful. So we need to be quiet for a while.

It's good for the crops, that's for sure. Just be still. Someone who I think is the emotional core of that movie, which is very widely appreciated and got 11 nominations. But it feels like a very tight race. So close watchers should watch closely. All right. And they can follow the latest in your podcast, The Big Picture on The Ringer.

That's Amanda Dobbins and Sean Fennessey who co-host that podcast. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you, Scott. Thanks for having us. This episode was produced by Mark Rivers. It was edited by Jeanette Woods. Our executive producer is Sammy Gannigan. Thank you to our Consider This Plus listeners who support the work of NPR journalists and help keep public radio strong.

You can learn more at plus.npr.org. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Scott Detrow.