The Oscar race arrives at the end of Sunday morning to Monday. He does it after a campaign – the term is no accident – that has been exhausting and even violent. Since September that the ban opens (with Venice and Toronto as large skimpads) little of the cinema and much of the controversies around many of the nominees have been talked about. They have all had their signal.
Anora It was attacked by Mikey Madison’s statements saying that they did not use intimacy coordinators in the filming. TO The Brutalist He touched him for the use of artificial intelligence to perfect the Hungarian accent of his protagonists and someone rescued an Adrien Brody gag in ‘Saturday Night Live’ where he laughed at the Jamaicans. By Fernanda Torres, nominated by I’m still here, They found a video where a BlackFace starred (played a character by painting Black’s face) …
The director of the Brazilian film, Walter Salles, told an interview at Eldiario.es how everything had changed in these years: “Now there is talk of the Oscar campaign. That word did not exist in 2005. That is one of the things that has impressed me the most, the idea that even semantically a language has been incorporated that has to do with the political world. A world where the objectives are completely different for cinema. Now everything is much bigger. Frankly, there is too much noise. I hope this really changes from now on, that things become much more human. ”
The summit of all that noise has been the campaign against Emilia Pérez. Jacques Audiard’s musical left Cannes AUPAPPAR like one of the movies that had liked the most (won the jury award and the best actress for all its protagonists) and Netflix, which this year had no own production for the awards season , he bought it with a talonario for 12 million dollars (to which a promotion campaign must be added that some media value at another 20 million dollars).
Few then imagined that the film was going to be criticized by the clichés with which the Mexican culture represented, for which it used to represent the trans community – with a demolishing article by Paul B. Precious to the head -, for the extreme right that Every time Karla Sofía Gascón spoke, the networks of transfugos insults filled and, in an unexpected turn, for the dusted tweets of the Spanish actress where it insulted almost every possible minorities.
Emilia Pérez He spent a month of being the great favorite, with 13 nominations, to the film that had to be fleeing. There is, in this event, a fact that looks like the quadrature of the perfect circle or, even for many, an act of poetic justice, since one of the people responsible for the Audiard film awards campaign is Lisa Taback, the great expert In campaigns for the Oscar whom Netflix signed six years ago when he became obsessed with winning the statuette. Taback has not yet won the best film for the platform, but its ways have already been noticed.
The signing of Taback is no accident, since she was one of the fundamental names of the awards campaigns that changed everything: the ones she made in Miramax under the orders of Harvey Weinstein who, before the cases of harassment and abuse were published Against dozens of actresses and women in the industry, he had built their prestige thanks to the Oscars he had won with films, a priori, more independent than their rivals. Miramax was founded as an author’s cinema defender. It was they who distributed Pulp fiction, But in 1998, after winning the Oscar with The English patientdiscovered the power of the awards and created a way to fight for them much more aggressive, based on the construction of the story and where the quality of the films went to the background.
The summit of all this happened in 1999, where Weinstein and Lisa Taback were active of the one considered the most unpleasant campaign of the entire Oscar history, which led to a romantic comedy of a period as correct as Shakespeare in love To take the award for the best film to a work that remained for the memory as Save Soldier Ryan. Harrison Ford’s surprise face when reading the envelope at that gala says everything. No one thought that John Madden’s film could win, and in fact the academy placed Ford, the protagonist of Indiana Jones, To give the last award.
What was lived in that awards race – and that has its echo today – has been counting in several reports that have given voice to what at that time were whispered rumors. Basically, Weinstein was accused of doing something that the academy explicitly prohibits: talking badly about the companions. In an article in The Hollywood Reporter Published 20 years later, Terry Press, the Marketing Chief of Dreamworks (the producer of Save Soldier Ryan) says that he began to receive calls from the press in which he was told that Weinstein had hired publicists trying to write articles saying “that the only amazing thing about Save Soldier Ryan It was the first 20 minutes, and then it was only a genre movie without more. ”
“I knew that Harvey was spending a lot of money, but that was the first time I lived a ‘rumors’ campaign against another movie. I heard that Harvey had basically gone around hiring people who were publicist from the old school, who were excited to think of them and commissioned this idea. I went to Steven and said: ‘Just to know, this is getting ugly.’ And Steven told me, I will never forget it, ‘it doesn’t matter, I don’t want you to get in the mud with Harvey Weinstein. I don’t want any negative campaign, ‘Press recalls in that report, in which Mark Gill, who was president of Miramax says that those accusations are not surprised, but that he never saw him.
Now we talk about the Oscar campaign. That word did not exist in 2005. Even semantically a language has been incorporated that has to do with politics
Walter Salles
– Filmmaker
It was not the only thing they did to the limit of legality: in 1997 the telephone campaigns had been prohibited where he was called a member asking for the vote. Weinstein did not ask for the vote, but as they say, he called to make sure they had seen the movie, they had received a copy and listen to their feedback. The campaign was tense and the Miramax team did not miss an opportunity. His most striking action was to put an announcement of Shakespeare in love During the interview that Monica Lewinsky granted, in the middle of the scandal of her relationship with Bill Clinton, to the journalist Barbara Walters and who saw 48 million viewers.
Weinstein himself acknowledged that from then on the campaigns became aggressive. “In those days, the studies had control of the Oscar, because none of the independents campaigned aggressively. The only thing we did to change the rules was, instead of simply staying with a crossed arms and that they beat us because someone had more money, more power, more influence, make a guerrilla campaign, ”said the producer in Peter Biskind’s book 2004, Down and Dirty Pictures.
The rules had changed. “He turned the Oscar campaign into a much bloody sport,” he said in an interview at the BBC Michael Schulamn, author of the book Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat and Tears. A bloody sport that has ended up splashed to Lisa Taback, one of its creators already Emilia Pérez, The film with which she thought she had found her new Shakespeare in love.
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