Is the Academy Oscar or an election campaign?

The long era of behind-the-scenes B-N-T wars known as Oscar season has finally come to an end. Months of excitement, non-stop interviews, photos on the covers of magazines and red carpets, are part of the detailed and very expensive campaign of Hollywood filmmakers, which was concluded on the night of the Oscars with the superiority of “Oppenheimer's film” and the end of the competition with “Barbie”. As time goes on, the advertising campaigns of Hollywood films to receive the Oscar award are starting to resemble presidential election campaigns.

According to Ham Mihan, the ways in which the actors of the films consider themselves deserving of nominations and attracting the most votes are not less than political campaigns. Actors participate in various events to connect closely with all the voters and show their appreciation. For several years, Oscar campaigns have been more intense and intense than previous years, to the point where even some audience on the website expressed concern about the health of Margot Robbie, the actress of the movie “Barbie”. Approximately 5 days a week, Robbie had to attend various formal luncheons and award ceremonies in a different outfit.

One of the creators of today's modern campaigns is Harvey Weinstein, the former Hollywood mogul and filmmaker, who is now serving time in prison for the Me Too or #metoo scandals. Weinstein was trying to get the message across that Academy voters basically have to vote on an idea to choose Best Actor or Best Picture.

Political advertising campaigns and Oscars have many similarities. One of these similarities is the message of the film. For example, Netflix used the slogan “a career worth celebrating” to promote Annette Bening's performance in the movie “Naiad” or that Bradley Cooper emphasized in his interviews about the making of the movie “Maestro” that he spent 6 years training to conduct an orchestra. The second is field presence, which in the presidential race is like shaking hands and talking to voters.

An action that is known in the Oscar world for participating in lunch parties, meetings and meetings not only with Oscar voters, but also attending forums and ceremonies at the Golden Globe and other voting bodies, and it is not the least of the preliminaries. In the 1990s, Harvey Weinstein led Miramax along with his brother Bob Weinstein. They saw themselves as an independent company with no power against the movie giants.

Weinstein likened Oscar campaigns to guerilla warfare where independent companies don't have the budget and relationships to compete; Therefore, the use of mass advertising (such as reportage ads published in entertainment trade publications) began. Miramax employees would contact voters to make sure they had seen the movie in question, and if some voters lived in another city, they would arrange for the film to be shown in a movie theater in that city to provide voters with a good time watching the movie.

An example of the famous saying that every vote is important. Until then, no one had gone as far in promoting a film as Weinstein. Advertising campaigns reached their peak in 1999. In that year's Oscar ceremony, the movie “Shakespeare in Love” from Miramax Company competed with “Saving Private Ryan” from DreamWorks Company. The advertising campaign for “Shakespeare in Love” is considered one of the ugliest Best Picture contests of all time.

What made it uglier was that DreamWorks found out that Weinstein was calling journalists and telling them to write that basically the first 25 minutes of the movie was watchable and the rest of it was a movie by World War II standards; So with great fury, DreamWorks ramped up its advertising campaign and re-released Saving Private Ryan in theaters months after the film was last shown. Steven Spielberg won the best director award, but the best film Oscar went to “Shakespeare in Love”.

It was from here that the arms struggle of film production companies began. DreamWorks adopted Weinstein's tactics the following year when it produced American Beauty; On the one hand, he doubled his advertising expenses, and on the other hand, he forced Kevin Spacey, an actor in a movie, to attend various events and festivals. Actions that totally paid off. The following year, the same method was used for the movie “Gladiator” and this movie also won an award.

It was at this time that Hollywood decided to spend millions of dollars hiring people as campaign strategists. These actions went until the Academy of Oscars had to set rules and limits on the financial budget of the campaigns. For some films, the advertising budget is more than the film production budget. The cost, time and energy spent on promoting films raises the question of whether a film should be awarded solely for its artistic merits or the fringes around it. What is clear is that the people who receive the award are not necessarily the best of the best. Each role finds the best meaning in its concept.