Inside The Oscar Wars

By RICHARD CORLISS

This was to be a gentler, G-rated Oscar race. After 9/11, surely Hollywood and the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences would behave with dignity. They would nominate the films (in February), vote on the finalists (by this Tuesday), then assemble, suavely tuxed and Armanied, for the Oscarcast on Sunday. They would cheer as Ron Howard finally won a Best Director prize, for A Beautiful Mind. It would be a very Opie evening. And, please, no fighting.

Are you kidding? Movie people--behave? Not with tens of millions of dollars in increased revenue from ticket sales and video rentals at stake. Not when it means ownership of a gold-plated statuette the whole town openly covets. Not with Russell Crowe and Matt Drudge around.

Movie studios love a good fight, and a bad one too. But the Oscar battles have become trench warfare and dirty tricks. Consider the tactics: covert ops, propaganda sorties, whispered slurs and innuendo to members of the media, enough bile to fuel a Senate campaign. And lots of money. By some estimates, $15 million or more for the Beautiful Mind Oscar push, or about $2,600 each for the 5,739 voting Academy members.

"The campaigns have always been competitive, but I don't recall it ever being as down and dirty as it seems to be this year," says Robert Osborne, a Hollywood Reporter columnist (and author of 70 Years of the Oscar: The Official History of the Academy Awards), who has been fed anonymous notes and e-mail tips assailing various Oscar contenders. Gone are the days when the studios' plan was simply to plow money into trade ads touting their films and stars--to out-green the competition. Now the idea is to out-mean them.

Some supporters of Denzel Washington (Training Day), Will Smith (Ali) and Halle Berry (Monster's Ball) are accused of playing the race card--whispering that if an actor of color doesn't win, it proves that Hollywood is antiblack. Some people competing against A Beautiful Mind--the biopic of schizophrenic mathematician John Nash, with the burly, brawly Crowe as its star--are drawing attention to incidents in the film's source book of anti-Semitic delusions and intense emotional relationships with other men, neither of which appeared in the movie; they're playing the Jewish card and the gay card. (Hollywood deals from a very colorful deck.)

At last week's Academy nominees' luncheon--until now a place for air kisses, not air strikes--the usually amiable Howard drew a link between political tricks and tactics directed at his film: "If there is an attack strategy that is a political tool--I guess really perfected by Lee Atwater working for George Bush on the Dukakis campaign--that it's about attempting to undermine another candidate's credibility, well, that's a shame." Terry Curtin, speaking for Universal, Howard's home studio, escalated the dudgeon. "It's gotten to be so dirty," she told the Washington Post, adding (cue violins), "The last pure place you thought you could go is completely tainted: the Academy race."

MAUL IN ROUGE

In fact, the awards were always--well, if not tainted, then tinted. In 1930 Mary Pickford, a founder of the Academy, won Best Actress after hosting lavish parties for voters at her Pickfair mansion. In the '30s, big studios would tell their contract artists which film to vote for. But the era of nuclear exchanges really began three years ago, when Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks and Harvey Weinstein's Miramax started duking it out over Best Picture. Miramax's Shakespeare in Love upset Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan in 1999; then American Beauty and Gladiator defeated Weinstein films.

This time will probably be different. Miramax's In the Bedroom is a long shot. And although DreamWorks did help finance A Beautiful Mind, the film is basically Universal's. The other finalists: New Line Cinema's The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, 20th Century Fox's Moulin Rouge and USA Films' Gosford Park.

All the studios have learned to play the game of X-treme hustling. They hire strategists to plot campaigns, dispatch nominees to meet phalanxes of voters. Like presidential candidates hitting retirement centers, contenders visit the Motion Picture and TV Fund home for retired film folk. "Visits to the Motion Picture Home are de rigueur," says an Oscar marketing maven. He acknowledges that few of the residents still vote. "It's a highly overrated situation. But, hey, a vote is a vote."

"We've certainly taken a page from the Harvey and Bob [Weinstein] school book," says a source working for Fox on Moulin Rouge, adding that Fox hired extra publicists to "grip and grin" voting Academy members in various age and job brackets. A rival also accuses the studio of using a confidential memo outlining Miramax's tried-and-true Oscar campaign strategies. "Absolutely absurd!" insists a Fox spokesman. But does Fox want to be a major Oscar winner too avidly? One studio consultant thinks the film's director, Baz Luhrmann, worked so hard "he appeared to be a circus ringmaster"--and got shut out in his own category.

A BEAUTIFUL MESS

A Beautiful Mind is in many ways a natural choice for Best Picture: a biopic about a troubled hero with a stalwart wife. And Crowe is a powerful, subtle performer--when he's not parading his loutishness. Last month, when his acceptance speech at the British Academy Film Awards was slightly edited for broadcast and he pushed and dressed down the TV show's producer, his Nash Oscar seemed in jeopardy. Crowe made a belated stab at good fellowship at the Academy luncheon, lingering to chat with reporters. And he spent quality phone time with the TV producer's young son--as close as Russell will ever come to eating crow.

But A Beautiful Mind has other...issues. Making sense of the whispering campaign against the film isn't easy, since in Hollywood at this time of year nobody talks on the record. And of course everyone lies. But according to a senior Universal Pictures executive, the back story goes like this:

Howard and producer Brian Grazer acquired the rights to Sylvia Nasar's unauthorized biography of John Forbes Nash and his wife Alicia. But they also had to pay Nash for his "life" rights. Nash negotiated a deal containing a "can't include without consent" clause and insisted he not be depicted as a homosexual because it wouldn't be true. He made no demands about his episode of anti-Jewish delusions described in the book or his relationship with another woman, with whom he fathered a son. Howard just didn't care to focus on those aspects, which he thought would only complicate the John-Alicia relationship at the heart of the film's story. (Nash finally agreed to explain his own story to Mike Wallace for the March 17 60 Minutes.)

If the filmmakers weren't interested in these incidents, Internet muckmaker Matt Drudge was. When the movie opened, he ran an item saying it had "completely scrubbed" any gay scenes from Nasar's book. Some thought the tip came from Miramax, but Drudge won't finger his source, saying, with a laugh, "Birds have been singing outside my window." A few weeks ago, he raised the Jewish question. Others tried to trace that tip to Fox, but Drudge says he found it himself when he read the book "and the Jew stuff popped out."

To some Beautiful bashers, these omissions are crucial--as if a biopic of Bill and Hillary Clinton had left out "I didn't inhale," Paula Jones and the cigar. But A Beautiful Mind--like the Iris Murdoch drama Iris, which has also been criticized for rouging the truth, and for which Judi Dench and Jim Broadbent are nominated this year--is biography simplified to a parable in which reason is lost and love sustained. Anyway, that's the movie that Howard made and that will probably be named Best Picture on Sunday. You see, now that it's been pilloried, it is officially eligible for sympathy votes.

BORED OF THE RINGS?

The Mind games should have given a boost to The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. It won the most nominations, and in 16 of the past 17 years, the film with the most nominations took the grand prize. But others think New Line hasn't taken advantage. "I don't feel their heat," a rival strategist observes. New Line exec Russell Schwartz has his own take, with a hint of 9/11: "Even though the movie takes place in a 'created' world, its themes of good vs. evil are more relevant than any movie out there right now." (Translation: If you don't vote for his movie, the terrorists have won.)

So far, the movie has been safe from the cinema Snidelys: not a word of anti-Hobbit propaganda has been spread. Yet handicappers say this enthralling Tolkien epic still trails A Beautiful Mind in Oscar's war of attrition. To stir some last-minute sympathy, maybe New Line should start a whispering campaign...against itself. --Reported by Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles

With reporting by Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles