I’m an Oscar nominee. Sell me
CATE Blanchett’s Bob Dylan in I’m Not There was an
acting tour de force. But if she wins the Oscar for best supporting
actress on Monday (Melbourne time) it will be due in part to a
spectacular feat of hucksterism.
How do you sell an actor whose first appearance is 42 minutes
down the track in a film that has made only $US3.8 million ($A4.15
million)? Leave it to Harvey Weinstein.
Blanchett’s fate at the 80th Academy Awards has already been
decided. Votes from the 6000-plus members of the Academy for Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences had to be lodged by 5pm on Tuesday. By
now there will have been a moment, perhaps much longer than that,
when Blanchett’s name was uppermost in each member’s mind.
Responsible for lodging it there is Weinstein, joint founder and
owner of Miramax and then the Weinstein Company film studio %26#151;
and, at 180 centimetres and 136 kilograms, an unmistakable physical
as well as marketing force.
Weinstein’s instincts have been sure and his elbows sharp from
the very beginning. He brought sex, lies and videotape and
My Left Foot to the screen in 1989, then followed up in the
’90s with Muriel’s Wedding, Pulp Fiction and The
English Patient.
Throughout this period, the studios with Oscar-nominated films
or actors took the view that the voters could not be trusted to
view each movie and performance on its merits. The campaigns in
support of each nominee grew nastier and more expensive.
They reached their nadir in 2002, when A Beautiful Mind,
the biopic about Nobel prize winning mathematician John Nash, was
favourite for best picture. Its star, Russell Crowe, was favourite
for best actor. One of the film’s rivals was In the Bedroom,
distributed by Miramax, now owned by Disney.
In the months preceding the Oscars of that year, stories began
circulating about the “real” John Nash, as distinct from the
mentally unbalanced genius of the film. So the world that had not
read the 1998 Nash biography was told of his anti-Semitic views and
his abandoned mistress and her child, along with suggestions of
homosexuality, none of which were referred to in the movie.
As it turned out, A Beautiful Mind won Oscars for best
picture and best actor. And the Academy tried to call a halt to the
shenanigans the following year.
“It’s gotten tremendously out of hand,” executive director Bruce
Davis said. “And it’s frustrating because it’s so stupid. The
audience you’re trying to influence is (made up of) the most
sophisticated filmmakers in the world.”
Little has changed in the years since, except that the marketing
of an Oscar hopeful has become more subtle and more expensive
%26#151; it is estimated $US60 million was spent on the 2007
campaigns, with full-page ads each day in The New York Times
and Los Angeles Times, and covers in the trade papers
Daily Variety and the Hollywood Reporter.
“There is a herd mentality that the studio marketing people
feed,” Davis said. “They’re all scared to death not to do as much
advertising as the next guy, because they think there must be
somebody out there who is influenced, or else the other studios
wouldn’t be spending so much money. The studios themselves are all
scared to death not to do it.”
The other side of that argument again involves Crowe, who has
repeatedly expressed his annoyance that Universal Studios did not
put more oomph into the Oscar marketing campaign for Cinderella
Man, which was largely overlooked in nominations for all
categories in 2005.
Blanchett’s role in I’m Not There began with breakfast
with the film’s director, Todd Haynes, on the morning of the 2005
Oscars. That evening she won the best supporting actress award for
her role as Katharine Hepburn in Aviator, a Miramax
film.
Within a month, Weinstein and his brother Bob announced the
establishment of their own company after an acrimonious split with
Disney. Among the first films they took on was I’m Not
There.
Blanchett’s immersion in the character of the mid-60s Dylan, one
of six vignettes from the rock legend’s life that form a composite
biography, was being talked up by Harvey Weinstein last August,
three months before the film’s premiere, and coinciding with the
appearance of some fortuitous clips of her in character on
YouTube.
“I may be jumping the gun,” Weinstein told The New York
Times, “but if Cate Blanchett doesn’t get nominated, I’ll shoot
myself.” No one said he was subtle.
For Australians, the Blanchett role will have a mournful
symbolism that surpasses even her appearance on film’s grandest
stage. In I’m Not There different actors play the character
of Dylan at various stages in his life. Blanchett’s Dylan is
followed onto the screen by the self-absorbed, superstar Dylan of
the ’70s, played by the late Australian actor Heath Ledger.
Gerard Wright is a freelance journalist based on the US West
Coast.
