7 Wild Oscar Campaigns That Could Have Only Happened in Hollywood
Moviegoers might think that Hollywood talent wins Academy Awards by merit alone, but often, nominees live or die on Oscar night by the effectiveness of their awards-season campaigns. In fact, you can probably thank million-dollar campaigns for Crash beating Brokeback Mountain for Best Picture or Shakespeare in Love beating Saving Private Ryan.
The conversation around Oscar campaign reform came up again this year when Andrea Riseborough earned a Best Actress nomination for the little-watched To Leslie. As you’ll see below, Riseborough’s surprise nod means that battles for Oscar glory — once fought in Hollywood parties, media junkets, and newspaper ads — can now be waged online.
Here’s a recap of Oscar campaigns that were so wild — so tireless, tricksy, or downright tacky — they could only have happened in Tinseltown.
95th Academy Awards, Sunday, March 12, 8/7c, ABC
The Alamo remembered
John Wayne billed The Alamo as “the most expensive picture ever made on American soil” in his patriotic Oscar campaign for the 1960 war film, per The Wrap. But costar Chill Wills upstaged and angered Wayne with an advertisement — attributed to press agent W.S. “Bow-Wow” Wojciechowicz — that claimed the Alamo cast was praying for Wills to win an Oscar “harder than the real Texans prayed for their lives at the Alamo.” Tacky ad campaign notwithstanding, Wills got an Oscar nod, but the trophy went to Spartacus’ Peter Ustinov.
Sally Kirkland’s Anna activism
Sally Kirkland (left, with Paulina Porizkova) drummed up her own Oscar publicity, putting in serious effort for a nomination for her role in the 1987 drama film Anna. As Vogue recalls, Kirkland attended events and courted journalists relentlessly, hired two press agents, purchased ads in trade publications, penned letters to all of the Academy members in her address book, and got friends Andy Warhol and Joan Rivers to sing her praises. Her efforts got her Oscar nomination, but she lost to Moonstruck’s Cher.
A Shakespeare plot
Led by the now-imprisoned Harvey Weinstein, Miramax spent a reported $15 million to promote Shakespeare in Love for the 1999 Oscars, as The Guardian reported at the time. Miramax also broke an Academy rule about hospitality, hosting a party with three Academy members present, the newspaper added. And the studio allegedly conducted a whisper campaign against rival film Saving Private Ryan, the film it ultimately beat for Best Picture.
A Beautiful Mind and ugly accusations
Miramax came under fire again in 2002 when media reports accused mathematician John Nash, subject of Universal’s Oscar-winning film A Beautiful Mind, of antisemitic statements — without the context that Nash made the statements while schizophrenic, as The New York Times reported. A representative for Miramax, whose movie In the Bedroom was also nominated for Best Picture that year, contacted the Los Angeles Times to direct the newspaper to reports of Nash’s statements, and Weinstein later apologized to Universal executives, according to The New York Times.“This may not be the worst year in Oscar history, but it’s pretty low,” film historian Pete Hammond told The New York Times. “To accuse the subject of a film of being antisemitic when you know that a lot of the people who will be voting on the Oscars are Jewish, well, that’s really down and dirty.”
Gangs of New York’s inside job
As Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York competed for Oscar glory in 2003, it got a glowing endorsement in a newspaper column attributed to former Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences president Robert Wise, himself an Oscar winner for directing West Side Story and The Sound of Music. But the Los Angeles Times later reported that Wise didn’t write one word of the column. Instead, the newspaper revealed, the author of the column was Murray Weissman, a publicist working with Miramax, the studio behind the film. (Yes, Miramax again!)
Consider… Melissa Leo
On her way to winning Oscar gold for her performance in The Fighter in 2011, Melissa Leo self-financed advertisements, with the word “CONSIDER” accompanying glamorous photos of the actress. Leo, then 50, told Deadline she organized the ad campaign after magazines passed her over for cover stories. “I took matters into my own hands,” she said. “I knew what I was doing and told my representation how earnest I was about this idea. I had never heard of any actor taking out an ad as themselves, and I wanted to give it a shot.”
Andrea Riseborough’s rise to the top
How did an under-the-radar thespian who starred in a movie that earned little more than $30,000 at the box office — that’s thousand, not million — get a Best Actress Oscar nomination this year, while The Woman King’s Viola Davis and Till’s Danielle Deadwyler didn’t? That’s the question pondered by awards-season pundits — and, it seems, Academy regulators — after To Leslie’s Andrea Riseborough edged into the Best Actress race through a grassroots Oscar campaign. That campaign seemed to include copy-and-pasted social-media endorsements from celebrities like Mia Farrow, Meredith Vieira, and Joe Mantegna, per The New York Times. After investigating the matter, however, the Academy let Riseborough’s nomination stand. “The Academy has determined the activity in question does not rise to the level that the film’s nomination should be rescinded,” Academy CEO Bill Kramer said in a statement last month. “However, we did discover social media and outreach campaigning tactics that caused concern. These tactics are being addressed with the responsible parties directly.”
