Given the complexities of the voting system, a pillow over the face may be preferable. In Peter Biskind’s book, Down and Dirty Pictures, publicist Mark Urman said Weinstein would ‘set up screenings at the Motion Picture Retirement Home, because Academy members live there, even if they’re on life support’. Weinstein’s Oscar tactics were varied in their dirtiness, but all had money at the heart, like the $5 million campaign for the pathetic Shakespeare in Love, which resulted in it beating Saving Private Ryan to Best Picture. Day-Lewis and Brenda Fricker both won that year. Staying with My Left Foot, guess who was behind its 1990 Oscars drive? Yep, Harvey Weinstein, who created a ‘guerrilla’ campaign where, chillingly, he arranged meet-and-greets between the film’s stars and Academy members. Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man, Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman, Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump… Eddie Redmayne recently said he regretted playing a trans woman in The Danish Girl, but what about winning an Oscar for hopping in a wheelchair to play Stephen Hawking? You suspect that today Daniel Day-Lewis wouldn’t get away with being carried around the set of My Left Foot every day ‘in character’ as Christy Brown without serious questions over whether one man’s cerebral palsy should be another man’s trophy bid. That’s why it became ‘a thing’ for Best Actor winners to portray a disability. Indeed, for an industry that awarded Harvey Weinstein’s films some 81 Oscars, it’s a case of the more aggressively goodhearted stories the better, to cover a multitude of sins. Traditionally, Oscars bait are those films that have a certain mighty worthiness, that show off the power of the Hollywood machine and its self-perceived good-heartedness. What Hollywood thinks of itself remains critical in predicting the award winners themselves.
Academy members resembling the cast of Cocoon remain the majority, and it’s still made up of mainly American ‘film industry professionals’, which means the Oscars reflect Hollywood, with all the self-congratulatory insanity that implies. However, any idea that voting may be in some way ‘fair’ would be a little naïve. Nevertheless, the Oscars are changing, and after Chloé Zhao became the first woman of colour to win Best Director this year, the 2022 race is intriguingly open.
Following much shame-induced restructuring, last year the Academy declared its members were now one third female and 19 per cent ‘under-represented minorities’ (yeah, under-represented thanks to you lot). Of course, the Academy has undergone reforms following the #OscarsSoWhite uproar in 20, which forced them to reveal 93 per cent of its 6,261 members were white, 76 per cent were men and there was a median age of 63.
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It’s basically a livestock show in which stars are tagged with the title of their movie and trotted out in executive suites across America, to be looked over and - in the old days - prodded by a cabal of old white men reminiscing about orgies with Fatty Arbuckle. 92nd Annual Academy Awards (AMPAS/ZUMA Wire/Shutterstock)Īpparently we’re in the thick of Oscars campaign season, with a slew of films and talk-show anecdotes arriving ahead of the ceremony in March.
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