Yahoo News And the award for best Oscar judge goes to… me, because I’ve actually been to see the film (and paid)!
On Sunday night the great and the good of the film world - or, if you’re watching from the White House, the overrated, the overpaid and the out-of-touch - will gather in Hollywood to show off their designer dresses, pretend to love each other’s work and deride their country’s new president in front of a global TV audience of gazillions.
They’ll also be competing to win a small gold-plated statuette just over a foot tall, weighing about half a stone. And all over the world film fans will be on tenterhooks wondering whether their favourites will win. Because everyone knows that an Oscar is the “ultimate accolade” in the movie business. But whoever wins, it won’t have come cheap, and it won’t necessarily be for the best film or the best performance of the year. There’s far too much money at stake for that.
Studios spend a fortune on Oscar campaigning, firstly to get nominated – a surefire boost to box office takings - and then for the big prizes. That’s why we’ve recently been besieged by famous actors giving interviews about films they made a year or two ago. It’s big business. Sums of up to £10 million per film are spent on advertising, promotion and special screenings aimed at softening up some of the 6,000 Academy members before they cast their votes in a competition that will earn millions for the winners. Outright bribery is banned but there are so many ways around that that they might as well not bother.
But all the promotion in the world cannot entirely swing it when the people choosing the winners may not have actually seen the films. It’s an open secret in Hollywood that many of these elderly white men haven’t set foot in a cinema without a red carpet outside for decades and (whisper it quietly) don’t watch the films at all. Sometimes, it’s said, they give their tickets to younger assistants to report back on their merits. And in a town where everyone knows everyone, the danger of nepotism is inescapable.
Towards “awards season” that town is also seething with highly-paid consultants whose little black books contain the names of all the Academy members. They invite them to VIP private screenings, often with the stars of the film in attendance, to add an extra sheen of vote-catching exclusivity (although, in a token gesture towards cutting back on bribery, free food and drink are now banned). And journalists will be given access – strictly controlled access – to all the nominees in the hope of maximising publicity.
It’s an interesting comparison to the music biz where journalists are regularly flown around the world in return for publicising records. It’s always been an awkward arrangement because, on the one hand, the journalists’ publications would have neither the money nor inclination to fly us to Los Angeles to talk to someone who may or may not have anything interesting to say, but on the other hand we’re at least subliminally less likely to express our full feelings of disappointment after being lavishly entertained at Hollywood hot spots and running up a massive bill for flights, taxis, hotels, food and drink that we will never have to pay.
If all goes well, it seems an eminently fair exchange; when things don’t go at all according to plan, it’s a bit of a dilemma. I myself have been in that quandary with an artist – let’s call her Macy Gray - who had almost literally nothing to say in our interview, leaving me desperately worried about being 5,000 miles from home with three or four pages of a Sunday magazine to fill. Fortunately, she retrieved the situation by inviting me round to her house before I flew home and taking me on a road trip with her family that ended, catastrophically for her – but fortunately for my story - in her arrest.
In today’s aura of austerity, such lavish trips have become rare but this week I was presented with an offer that I found hard to refuse – and one which proved that a good publicity stunt does not need to cost millions. Or, for that matter, anything. At the invitation of a PR person called Ellie, I spent an afternoon listening to a musician you’ve probably not heard of promoting his new record by performing in “the world’s smallest venue” – a 1970s-vintage gold caravan – in an underground car park in south London.
If James McArthur was hoping to exert enough influence to get into the pop charts he may have miscalculated. Although he was performing to a full house, there were still only three of us – me and my friends Nathalia and Ben – and three of them: James and his two bandmates, Johnny and Jim (aka The Head Gardeners), playing guitar, pedal steel and fiddle respectively. If a little short on wild applause, it was an intimate experience that we all thoroughly enjoyed and I warmly recommend their new album of whimsical English folk music, which is called ‘Burnt Moth’ and sounds particularly good when sung live from a distance of about two feet. I will declare now that I have not received a penny for my recommendation: merely a couple of glasses of wine (and a couple more for Nathalia) while they serenaded us in their candlelit caravan.
That seems a reasonable investment by James (and Ellie) in a potential plug for his record and would not, I imagine, have been too painful a write-off had I instead expressed grave misgivings about his music. The benefits to James of an endorsement here for ‘Burnt Moth’ could, at best, mean a handful more concert tickets sold or albums bought (I may be flattering myself here). The benefits for an Oscar-winning movie are in another stratosphere altogether.
Apart from the prestige, there are millions at stake. The calculations are not an exact science but it’s been estimated that films which are nominated – either for the film itself or the actors in it – can expect to make around $10 million more after the nominations are announced, thus justifying the investment that will doubtless be made in converting that nomination into a victory. And the rewards for the victors are commensurately greater.
The picture that wins Best Film will usually make around $14 million more than its fellow nominees in the weeks following the ceremony. The Best Actor, meanwhile, can expect to cash in by boosting his salary by 80 per cent - probably worth an extra $4 million per film. The Best Actress, by contrast, is likely to see a much smaller benefit – around $500,000 - in Hollywood’s unequal world of ageism and glass ceilings.
But who are these Academy members who hold these fortunes in their hands? Well, according to the LA Times in 2010, 94 per cent of them were white and 77 per cent of them were men and their average age was 63. By last year, when you may remember there was a controversy about the all-white-ness of the nominations, things had improved. Slightly: the number of white people was down to 91 per cent (blacks made up three per cent, Asians and Latinos level on two per cent each), and the number of men down to 76 per cent. To put it another way, out of the 6,000-odd Academy members, around 1,500 are women, and around 535 are non-white.
It will therefore be interesting to see what they come up with this year, when there is a higher-than-average proportion of black nominees – seven of the 20 – following three consecutive years in which all 20 nominees in the acting categories were white, prompting last year’s #oscarshowhite boycott. It seems inconceivable, therefore, that the winners will all be white.
I’m going to stick my neck out (not much, admittedly – the bookies are behind me here) and predict that Viola Davis will pick up Best Supporting Actress for ‘Fences’, with Mahershala Ali joining her as Best Supporting Actor for ‘Moonlight’. There’s a lot of money on Denzel Washington for Best Actor for ‘Fences’ but I’m plumping for Casey Affleck for his heart-rending performance in ‘Manchester By The Sea’, and many think Natalie Portman is a shoe-in for Best Actress for ‘Jackie’ but I reckon she’ll be pipped by Emma Stone for ‘La La Land’, which will also win Best Film and Best Director for Damian Chazelle (not to mention most of the awards for Editing, Cinematography, Production Design, Music, Costumes and Sound).
But what do I know? I’m just a film fan who goes to the cinema a lot – which makes me massively out of touch with those 6,000 people who will actually make the final decision on Sunday night. And nobody invited me to any special screenings: I saw most of them in my local cinema, the Rio, with a cup of coffee and, sometimes when I was peckish, a samosa made by an Indian lady who lives in the same street as the cinema - all of which I paid for myself.
On the other hand I am a white man, so perhaps I do know best. We’ll find out on Monday morning.
