Stumping for Oscar Gold

The Daily Beast features this article by Nicole LaPorte on the Best Actress Oscar race and the competition between Meryl Streep, who is nominated for Julia and Julia, and Sandra Bullock, who is nominated for The Blind Side. Aside from ignoring the fact that neither of these movies were all that good, what the article exposes is the extent to which Oscar statuettes are campaigned for, much in the same way politicians stump for political office.

An excerpt:

Observers are also noting how aggressively Bullock is hitting the campaign trail—and no one in these parts pretends anything less than campaigning is taking place in the Champagne-fueled weeks leading up to the Oscars. Since the fall, the actress has been on an all-out crusade, involving pit-stops on all the morning and late-night talk shows. She's been the belle of Blind Side cocktail parties, such as the one last December held at Il Cielo in Beverly Hills, where Bullock held court in a red velvet dress, shaking hands and chit-chatting with journalists. Last weekend, she received a special award—the vague, slightly foreign-sounding Riviera Award—at the Santa Barbara Film Festival, which is conveniently located in the tony town that many Academy members call home.

But Bullock's sweat shows how badly she wants it. And the Academy likes its stars to want what it bequeaths.

"Academy members are quite delighted to watch this circus, because it means that what we as members do is meaningful," said one.

This is nothing new; campaigning for awards has been the norm for quite a while. But it is more alarming in the way the campaigning has gotten out of control. According to this entry from Nikki Finke's blog, during last year's Oscar race studios spent extravagant amounts of money on promotional items directed at a Academy voters while laying off their work force and cancelling or scaling back future productions. And the downfall of studio specialty divisions like Warner Independent Pictures, Miramax, and Paramount Vantage (which, ironically, produced many recent Oscar winners and nominees) was facilitated in part by the amount of money these divisions spent on their Oscar campaigns.

And this leads finally to this question: what is the payoff? Most of these films are out on DVD by the time the winners are announced, so there may be a slight bump for DVD rentals and sales but in the long term what is gained? Even if films win an award, it is given to them not based on quality but on how effectively the studio and the film's stars licked Academy member's boots. And when that is the case, an award titled "Best Picture" loses all meaning.