Planet Money - On the Oscars campaign trail

Episode Date: March 8, 2024

When you sit down to watch the Oscars, what you are really watching is the final battle in a months-long war of financial engineering and campaign strategy. Because in Hollywood, every year is an election year. A small army of Oscars campaign strategists help studios and streamers deploy tens of millions of dollars to sway Academy voters. And the signs of these campaigns are everywhere — from the endless celebrity appearances on late night TV to the billboards along your daily commute. On today's show, we hit the Oscars campaign trail to learn how these campaigns got so big in the first place. And we look into why Hollywood is still spending so much chasing gold statues, when the old playbook for how to make money on them is being rewritten. This episode was hosted by Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi. It was produced by Emma Peaslee and edited by Jess Jiang. It was engineered by Cena Loffredo and fact checked by Sierra Juarez. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer. Help support Planet Money and get bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

On NPR's ThruLine. It's difficult to imagine an America without tipping in restaurants or wherever else. When tipping first came, it was the most un-American thing to tip. And now it's the most un-American thing to take it away. The long, complicated legacy of tipping in America. Find NPR's ThruLine wherever you get your podcasts. This is Planet Money from NPR. When I reached journalist Matt Bellany last week, it was in the final 24 hours of an intensely fought campaign season.

Different factions led by specialized campaign strategists had just spent the better part of eight months pushing their candidates through a grueling gauntlet of stump speeches, fancy galas, voter outreach events, many of which Matt had himself attended. Do you ever think of yourself as a kind of campaign reporter? Oh, all the time. I am a campaign reporter for the entertainment industry. Matt used to be the editor of The Hollywood Reporter. These days, he hosts a podcast called The Town. And yes, the campaigns that we're talking about today, these are the glitzy, glossy campaigns put on by Hollywood movie studios every year

in hopes of winning big at the Academy Awards. And these campaigns come to a head in the weeks leading up to the ceremony. And that's where you start to see people doing desperate things, like taking off all their clothes and floating in a freezing river like Bradley Cooper did for the New York Times magazine. Or you see Ryan Gosling climbing the Warner Brothers water tower to take a photo for a trade magazine. Or you see the border collie from the movie Anatomy of a Fall get treated like

a celebrity and carted around town and brought to charm voters. That is a campaign strategy. Matt says that this time of year, the signs of this massive campaign machinery are all around us. Like, maybe you saw Best Actress nominee Emma Stone hosting SNL. Ladies and gentlemen, Emma Stone! Or maybe you heard her wherever you get your podcasts. Emma Stone, welcome to Fresh Air. I love this movie and your performance in it. Maybe you caught Best Actor nominee Cillian Murphy of Oppenheimer profiled on CBS's 60 Minutes, seven months after the movie came out, but perfectly timed to the start of Academy voting.

2023 was the year the world learned to pronounce Killian, the ancient Irish name. Or you may have noticed the mysterious words, for your consideration, splashed across movie ads in your local newspaper or on billboards all across Los Angeles. And maybe you wondered, is it my consideration they're asking for? No, although it's a nice byproduct, I guess. The consideration they are asking for is awards voters to consider this movie for awards voting. For a long time, I think I had this kind of naive understanding of award shows like the Oscars.

Like, sure, they are maybe a nauseatingly self-aggrandizing celebration of Hollywood. But at their core, I think I assumed that they were basically meritocratic. Matt Bellany says no. When you watch the Oscars, you are watching the end result of an eight to ten month strategic and very expensive political campaign. Plain and simple. Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi. Once upon a time, getting a big Oscar nomination or a win could dependably be turned into box office gold. But over the past couple decades, the economics of moviemaking have changed that calculus.

Today on the show, we peek into the Oscars campaign playbook to figure out why Hollywood juggernauts are still spending tens of millions of dollars trying to win Academy Awards. If you need a good laugh, tune into the next All Songs Considered from NPR Music as we play a mix of the funniest songs of all time with a little help from Weird Al Yankovic. I had no idea laughter and joy was good for you. That's a revelation. Listen to All Songs Considered every Tuesday wherever you get podcasts.

There's a lot of stuff to watch out there. Pop Culture Happy Hour, a four-day-a-week, 20-minute-a-day podcast helps you pick out what's worthy of your next big binge. Whether it's a new show, a buzzy book, or a movie that we can't stop talking about, Pop Culture Happy Hour is here with a recommendation you'll want to snuggle up with, guaranteed. Listen to Pop Culture Happy Hour every day, only from NPR. This message comes from Think Fast, Talk Smart. Each week, host Matt Abrams teaches listeners how to excel at small talk, write winning emails, and keep the nerves in check when speaking in front of crowds.

Listen every Tuesday where you get your podcasts. Heads up, in this episode we mention Amazon, Apple, Disney, Neon Films, Netflix, and Universal Pictures, all companies that sponsor NPR or pay to distribute NPR content. So this can be a kind of notoriously secretive part of the entertainment industry. Like, give us a sense of how you've come to know what you know when it comes to these Oscars campaigns. Well, I have been a journalist covering this industry for more than 15 years.

Before that, I was an entertainment lawyer and in the business and seeing it. But it is an ecosystem unto itself. Matt Bellany has spent the past two decades translating the inner workings of Hollywood for outsiders and insiders alike. And he says the key thing to understand about the Oscars race is that it boils down to convincing individual people to support your film.

All you're trying to do is get as many votes as you can, solidify your coalition, and hopefully get a victory. Yeah. And who exactly is the electorate here? The electorate ultimately is the 10,000 or so members of the Motion Picture Academy. These voters are people who've worked in the film industry and who've been invited by its board to join the Academy. Matt says that the first phase of the Oscars race, phase one, is all about getting those voters to nominate your film. That means targeting specific groups of voters because the Academy's 10,000 or so members are divided into branches. Each branch nominates the nominees in their branch.

So editors vote for editors, directors vote for directors, actors vote for actors, except Best Picture. Best Picture is voted on by everybody. So if you are running a campaign, the strategy for phase one is to pick the battles you think you might be able to win.

Is your client sitting on a potential Best Director award? You're going to have to figure out how and where to reach every eligible director in the academy to make sure that they have seen your movie. You'll send them screener links, invite them to star-studded, well-catered in-person screenings. Then the nominations come out and we enter phase two, where the table has been set, and now you are trying to get people to vote for your candidate to win. In phase two, Matt explains, every Academy voter is fair game, because every voter is now eligible to vote in every category. And phase two is all about framing the film with a message, something that'll make it feel bigger than just a piece of entertainment.

Like you can feel good voting for this movie because it means something. That's the job of the awards campaigner, to take a movie and make it important. So take this year's frontrunner, Oppenheimer. Matt says that film has been sold as the big, important Hollywood studio movie that, for the good of the business and the good of the industry, you should vote for this for Best Picture. They used a quote from a review that said, this is the best movie of the century

or something like that. We're only a quarter in. Well, you know, it's an ad. Compare that to the messaging for the movie Poor Things, whose four-year consideration ads implore voters to, quote, defy expectations. Kind of an underdog message. Now, once you have your message, Matt says, the campaigns are then really about using every ounce of star power and publicity at your disposal to charm Academy voters. This is why Oscar-thirsty celebrities do splashy magazine covers or well-timed radio interviews, or why they

appear at special screenings or talk at Q&As where voters might be in attendance. And every chance encounter between the talent and the voters can be incredibly important, because sometimes the way people vote can have little to do with the actual film they're being asked to consider. For example, the Hollywood Reporter does anonymous polling with individual Academy voters every year. Which reveals that people vote for the strangest reasons. This guy that Hollywood Reporter just did a ballot with, he says that he voted for Robert Downey Jr. I'm not kidding, because Downey was nice to him at a party. Now, if all of this seems like a giant hype machine of recirculating hot air, that is very much by design.

The Academy Awards were initially conceived in the 1920s in part as a way of flattering and distracting actors who were flirting with unionization, but also as a way to promote the industry to the wider world. For most of the 20th century, it was standard for Hollywood studios to promote their films and stars for awards, but the amount of money and strategy directed solely with the aim of winning Oscars was comparatively low. So to understand how Oscars campaigns transformed into the super expensive, highly competitive circus we see today,

I went to visit someone who's worked on these campaigns for decades. Have you been working on any campaigns we might have heard of? Oppenheimer. Oh yeah, I've heard of that. Tony Angelotti got his start in the 1980s, and since then, he's had a kind of front row seat to the transformation of Oscars campaigns. I met him at his office in L.A., where the walls are covered with framed signed posters from his different movie campaigns. Well, in this room, let's see, we're looking at various campaigns that were either winners or nominated for Best Picture or won a number of things. Life is Beautiful, Pulp Fiction, Frost-N Nixon, Finding Nemo, Ray. These are all movies

I worked on. Tony says when he first started, the big studios had viewed Oscars campaigns as a way to keep the talent happy. It was just a cost of doing business. And if you did end up winning or getting nominated for a major category, you could count on what insiders call the Oscar bump. One study found if you won Best Picture in those days, it could mean up to a $12 million bump at the box office. But when Tony arrived at a company called Miramax in the early 1990s, it was already becoming clear that the company's founders, Bob and Harvey Weinstein, were thinking differently about chasing Oscars. Yes, the story of how Oscars campaigns blew up is inextricably and

unfortunately linked to disgraced film executive Harvey Weinstein and how his company used the Oscars to break into the industry. It was integral to their business plan. They needed the attention of the awards to make money on these movies. Bob and Harvey Weinstein's business strategy in the beginning came down to a kind of bet. It centered on buying and distributing smaller indie movies and foreign films that had already been made. These movies might impress film buffs — things like Pele the Conqueror or Sex, Lies, and Videotape — but they sometimes didn't do well at the box office.

Still, Miramax would make a big Oscar push, which went against the prevailing wisdom. No one's going to take a movie back then that had failed at the box office and campaign it. Who's going to throw good money after bad, right? He would do that. Because as Miramax discovered early on, if they could campaign aggressively enough to get Oscar nominations, they could then do a wide release of the film in theaters across the country and use the nomination buzz to turbocharge ticket sales. So all of a sudden, if you're getting awards attention for these films, it was easier for them to get more television sales, airplane sales, international sales. And then came the ancillary markets like the VHS

cassettes, then the DVDs. It's an endless stream of how a movie could expand on its profit. By the early 90s, Harvey Weinstein had already started to use the aggressive campaign tactics and stunts he'd become known for. For example, as part of the campaign for the movie My Left Foot, the film's star, Daniel Day-Lewis, testified in Congress in support of the Americans with Disabilities Act. It was a way to get headlines and maybe align the film with a higher purpose that could appeal to Academy voters. And the Oscar goes to Daniel Day-Lewis. Miramax's bet to use Oscar buzz to turn indie films into box office hits started to pay off. In 1993,

they were bought by Disney, and with all that financial firepower, they got more into the business of actually making films, with a stable of A-list talent. But the campaign season that many see as a turning point, where it became clear that Osc's campaigns had changed, came in 1999. That was the year that Miramax went up against Steven Spielberg's World War II epic, Saving Private Ryan. Some private in the 101st lost three of his brothers and he's got a ticket home. It's not going to be easy finding one particular soldier in the whole damn war. For most of the campaign season, Saving Private Ryan had been seen as the clear frontrunner, an Oscar-winning director telling the story of D-Day.

But just a few months before the Oscars, Miramax released Shakespeare in Love, this irreverent romantic comedy about a struggling young William Shakespeare. Meet young Will Shakespeare. I have a sonnet to write. Sonnet? You mean a play? He's out of luck. I say this theater is closed! Out of money. I'm still on money for this play. Sonnet? You mean a play? He's out of luck. I say this theater is closed. Out of money.

I'm still on money for this play. What is money to you and me? And out of ideas. Over the next couple months, Saving Private Ryan and Shakespeare in Love waged massive competing campaigns. They flooded newspapers and magazines with four-year consideration ads and made sure their stars were all over TV. four-year consideration ads and made sure their stars were all over TV. Tony Angellotti worked on the Shakespeare in Love campaign, and he says winning Best Picture still felt like this impossible long shot,

up until the moment the winner was announced. He remembers being in the wings at the 1999 Academy Awards ceremony when Harrison Ford walked out on stage. There are five nominated films for Best Picture. They are. And Harrison Ford announcing the winner seemed like a bad omen, because he'd been the one to announce Spielberg's previous win for Schindler's List. And Harrison comes up, and I'm, you know, 100% sure it's going to be Saving Private Ryan. 100%. There wasn't a part of me that thought Shakespeare was going to win. Harrison was going to give it to Stephen, just like he did on Schindler's. He reads the envelope and he looks down and he never even lifts his head.

And he says, Shakespeare in love. I, I like sort of lost consciousness. I like my back went against the wall. Something had just happened that wasn't meant to happen. You know, this was alternate reality. And Tony was not the only one who felt like reality had just shifted. After the break, a new band of Hollywood outsiders sweeps into town with their sights set on Oscar gold. And the campaign circus blows up. in depth. For talking points for your next happy hour, check out Pop Culture Happy Hour,

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race over Oscars. Miramax and the Weinstein companies took campaigning and they just turned it into a blood sport. Entertainment journalist Matt Bellany again. It was all about winning. And that ethos has informed the past two decades of Oscar campaigning. Other Hollywood studios started upping their campaign game in order to compete. And many of the campaign strategists who cut their teeth at Miramax moved on to prominent positions throughout the industry. And Matt says that while Oscars campaigns have gotten even bigger and more expensive over the last couple decades, many of the revenue streams that made Miramax's Oscar strategy so profitable have started to disappear. And the major economic force that's been driving those changes can be boiled down to two words.

Streaming companies. Netflix and Hulu and Amazon and Apple and all these others came into the game. And they decided that awards are a differentiator for them. And they started spending huge amounts of money to win them. About a decade ago, Netflix officially kicked off the streaming era when they made their fateful pivot from a DVD mail order service to a full on production studio. Within a few years, they'd set their sights on competing with big Hollywood movie studios at their own game. And that meant courting Oscar winning directors like Martin Scorsese and Alfonso Cuaron. And just as the old Hollywood studios had viewed the Academy Awards as a way of attracting and retaining talent, so too did Netflix. They wanted to work with the top talents.

The top talents want to win awards. So Netflix was able to say, we're not going to get you a wide theatrical release, but we can campaign for awards like anybody else and we can get you nominated. And in fact, because of their deep pockets, Netflix was willing and able to campaign on a massive scale, orchestrated by a seasoned strategist. They hired one of the biggest campaigners, Lisa Tabak. She was a Harvey Weinstein acolyte back in the Miramax and Weinstein company days. They bought her company, brought her in-house, and she's got dozens of people that work for her on global awards campaigns. We reached out to Netflix for an interview, but the company declined. What is clear is that Lisa Tabak's first year at the company

involved one of the most visible campaigns in Oscars history, the one for Alfonso Cuaron's film Roma. The Roma campaign is considered the high point of the Netflix Oscar campaigning. They spent, by most estimates, $30, $40 million on that campaign, and they were everywhere. Netflix would not confirm those estimates. They refused to give specifics. But keep in mind that Roma's production budget was around $15 million, which means Netflix likely spent much more

to market the film during the 2019 Academy Awards season than what the film actually cost to make. You could not walk down the street without seeing a billboard or a bus ad. They were doing like crazy things with the trades. Now, as a streaming company, Netflix faced a kind of technical problem when it came to qualifying for the Oscars. At the time, the Academy typically required films to open theatrically for at least a week in New York and Los Angeles. In years past, Netflix had been able to qualify by making deals with some movie theaters, but they'd gotten a lot of pushback.

And in 2019, they decided to start buying their own movie theaters. So qualifying became less of a hassle. And in another example of infrastructure-level investment, Netflix decided to basically guarantee that its four-year consideration ads would be considered to basically guarantee that its four-year consideration ads would be considered by buying up most of the billboards on the Sunset Strip, where a huge number of Academy voters, you know, like film executives, actors, writers, all commute in LA's notorious traffic to get to their offices and film sets. So if you go down Sunset Boulevard, all the famous gigantic billboards, most of them are Netflix because they

bought them and they use them for their awards campaigns. Now, some of these moves may sound a little over the top, but let's take a step back for a moment and think about why Netflix was jumping into the Oscars race. By offering these big cinematic films from some of the most respected filmmakers in the industry, Netflix was making a play for market share of the movie business. On the one hand, they were signaling to the world that their subscribers would no longer need to go to the theater to experience high cinema. And on the other hand, they were trying to put streaming companies on equal footing with Hollywood studios in the minds of the film community. In the end, Roma did pick up

10 nominations and won for Best Foreign Language Film and Best Director, but they did not win for Best Picture. In part, Matt Bellany thinks, that's because many Academy voters see Netflix's streaming business as a kind of threat. For some of these old-time Hollywood hardliners, they don't like the fact that Netflix doesn't release movies in theaters. They just don't like it. But like it or not, Netflix and its fellow streamers had arrived at the Oscars, at a time when their models were changing two of the big ways that Oscars can be profitable. First, the streamers have chipped away at box office earnings,

because you can now watch a universe of entertainment at your house for the price of a single movie ticket. And second, they've basically replaced DVD and VHS sales. They've been siphoning away two major components of the Oscar bump that the Miramax strategy relied on. Now, as there are more entertainment choices, as streaming services have proliferated, and more importantly, as streaming services have joined the Oscar race, there is less of that business to go around. And you see film after film being in the Oscar race and the economics not really matching up. Which finally brings us to the fundamental question at the core of this episode. Okay, so if the direct returns from

an Oscar nomination or a win are less directly profitable than back when movie theaters and VHS tapes like reigned supreme, then why are all these different companies spending, you know, almost more money than ever to campaign? A couple reasons. First, Matt says it's important to remember how these different players in the Oscars race actually make their money. The streamers, for instance, are, at their core, technology companies. Places like Amazon and Apple are using the Oscars to build up their brands. They're banking on that Oscar buzz to help them get more people onto Amazon Prime or get them to buy Apple devices. If you can say, we are Apple TV+, home of the Oscar Best Picture winner, CODA,

that translates into subscriptions and viewership, typically. But this new wave of tech money hasn't proved to be the only way to get Oscar wins and nominations. Some players are still using a version of Miramax's model to punch above their weight. Smaller independent studios like A24 and Neon, they've managed to find Oscar success over the past few years in part because of the changing demographics of the Academy itself. In 2015, the Academy was called out for being overwhelmingly

white. And since then, they've invited several thousand new members to join. These new members are younger, more diverse, and they live all around the world. And many of these voters seem to be more sympathetic to smaller independent movies and foreign films. Right now, about a quarter of the Academy does not live in America. And that is a big change. And you've seen it manifest in a number of foreign language films getting nominations and even winning in previous years. Look at Parasite in 2020. Parasite won Best Picture, and that's the first time a foreign language film has ever won Best Picture. And finally, there are the major Hollywood studios, who've also had to up their campaign game to compete for A-list actors and directors. Take the campaign around this year's Best Picture frontrunner, Oppenheimer.

Matt says that for Universal, the studio, running a robust Oscars campaign is just the cost of doing business with someone like director Christopher Nolan. Because if Universal's awards team can help push Oppenheimer into the ranks of Oscar winners, they stand a better chance of getting Nolan's next film. And spending $10, $20, even $30 million on an Oscars campaign? That is a drop in the bucket compared to what Christopher Nolan could bring to Universal if he stays. Oppenheimer, for instance, has already grossed nearly a billion dollars. Plus, Matt points out, even if the Oscars bump is less pronounced than in the past, there is still economic value to getting that best picture brand halo on your film. That movie is going to be in the Universal Library forever, and it will be more valuable

than other three-hour biopics who did well at the box office because it will have won Best Picture. Right. It's kind of lifetime earnings forever change if it's in that pantheon. Yeah. These companies make a lot of money on the old movies and licensing them out and putting them in different packages and on different platforms. So it may take longer these days to recoup the costs of a major campaign than in the heyday of movie theaters and DVDs. But every time they license or sell the rights to a winning film, they'll be able to collect on that Best Picture premium. Which is why it seems safe to say that the Oscars campaign circus

is here to stay, with or without your consideration. Coming up on the next Planet Money, rum, an island paradise, and a scheme that turned two American territories into bitter rivals. Tell you man, this thing made enemies for us. It's a story of how hundreds of millions of federal tax dollars wound up in the pockets of some of the biggest liquor companies in the world. Those were the rum wars. Next time on Planet Money.

Today's episode was produced by Emma Peasley and edited by Jess Jang. It was engineered by Sina Lefredo and fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer. Special thanks to Nina Gregory, Mandali Delbarco, and Rose Friedman. I'm Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi. This is NPR. Thanks for listening. While TikTok gets a lot of heat for addiction, security issues, and misinformation,

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