Oscar Campaigns

[Damien]

Harvey Weinstein is at it already:

From the NY Times:

WEINSTEIN SENDS HOLLYWOOD AN OSCAR-TIME MASH NOTE
By MICHAEL CIEPLY

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. (November 27, 2011) — There he was, Harvey Weinstein, master of the movie awards game, flanked by a golden Oscar much taller than he, and two dark- haired granddaughters of Charlie Chaplin, the King of Silents.

Mr. Weinstein was onstage at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences last Monday to introduce “The Artist,” a (mostly) silent picture that is his latest contender for regular-size Oscars. The Chaplin offspring, Carmen and Dolores, had no particular stake in the film but said their grandfather would have loved it.

An audience packed with awards season voters heard Mr. Weinstein tell how even his brother Bob, a partner in the Weinstein Company, thought he was crazy to risk “a lot of millions” on a black-and-white valentine to Los Angeles, and to the movies, and to an industry that was packed into the Academy’s own theater to see what the mogul behind last year’s best picture, “The King’s Speech,” had wrought.

If they gave an Oscar for best campaign moment, Mr. Weinstein could have taken his home that night.

But the Academy Awards are still almost three months away — time enough to test whether Mr. Weinstein’s skills, and Hollywood’s fascination with itself, will turn one of the year’s least likely contenders into an Oscar-winning best picture. To win it will have to outmatch some ferocious competitors in a late-breaking year that has found no overwhelming favorite, as “Slumdog Millionaire” was in 2008, and remains peppered with possibilities.

Not least among those are “The Descendants,” from the star George Clooney, the director Alexander Payne, and the company, Fox Searchlight, that made “Slumdog Millionaire” a winner. Still ahead, among others, are “Carnage” from Roman Polanski, and a pair of possible contenders, David Fincher’s “Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” and Stephen Daldry’s “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” from the producer Scott Rudin, who had two best picture nominees last year, “The Social Network” and “True Grit.”

And pictures from earlier in the year will surely resurface. Billboards and radio airwaves here have already blossomed with advertisements offering “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2” as an awards prospect. An Oscar for the last “Harry Potter” film might be seen as a vote for the entire blockbuster series.

For the moment, however, Hollywood’s professional Oscar campaigners — who generally do not discuss their craft publicly, for fear of diminishing its effect — are privately buzzing about Mr. Weinstein’s bid to outmaneuver films that are bigger, broader and better positioned for the general audience. He is doing that by playing to the movie industry’s wobbly sense of self, exactly at a time when it is fretting about declining attendance, weak economics and constant pressure from other media.

Directed by the French filmmaker Michel Hazanavicius, with Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo in lead roles, “The Artist” tells of a silent star, George Valentin, who misses the transition to talkies at the end of the 1920s, and of his relationship with a young actress, Peppy Miller, who blooms with the advent of sound. That it plays in almost utter silence, background music aside, has become a selling point for Mr. Weinstein and others, who point to their own bravery in mounting a tribute to the silent era by relying, more or less, on its own techniques.

“The truth is that it was a bad idea, a very bad idea,” Mr. Hazanavicius told the In Contention Oscar blog — one among a flood of media reports that are meant to challenge viewers and make a virtue of the movie’s primary handicap, its lack of voice.

“The Artist” opened on Friday in just four theaters, two in New York and two in Los Angeles. San Francisco will see the film on Friday, and more cities and theaters will follow, as expected interest builds.

Among nervous rivals, “The Artist” is being compared to an Italian fable about the movies, “Cinema Paradiso,” which won the Oscar for best foreign language film in 1990, after being released by the Weinsteins’ Miramax Films in the United States.

Yet “Cinema Paradiso,” though much loved here, was nominated for no Academy Awards outside the foreign-language category. Other than a brush with the movies in “Crash,” in which one of many subplots involved a film director, no film focused squarely on the movies has won best picture Oscar. Perhaps the closest the Academy has come in the last 60 years was the 1951 best picture Oscar for “All About Eve,” a show-business drama about the stage.

On Oscar night, almost without exception, Hollywood has favored films that look far from itself. That has meant dwelling on distant wars (“Patton”), epic romance (“Titanic”), utter fantasy (“The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King”), or moral triumph (“The King’s Speech”) — in most cases the further from home, the better.

Self-reflection may finally be the order of the day.

Mr. Weinstein seems to thinks so. After all, he has not one but two movie-world fables in the race this year, the other being “My Week With Marilyn,” in which Michelle Williams plays Marilyn Monroe. And Martin Scorsese’s ode to the pioneering French filmmaker Georges Méliès, “Hugo,” is also a potential contender.

When it comes to campaigning, it is safe to say that Mr. Weinstein is just getting warmed up with his Academy appearance, another stop shortly before at the AFI Fest film festival here and, this weekend, a first-person piece about what makes him tick on The Huffington Post. A primary focus so far has been on getting those who vote for critics awards to see “The Artist” and other Weinstein pictures. Sarah Greenberg Roberts, who is in charge of marketing and publicity for the Weinstein Company, declined to comment on the campaigns. But people familiar with the Weinstein plans have said there will be plenty more to come.

And showing up at the Academy with a Chaplin on either arm can’t hurt.