Hello, I'm James Reynolds from the BBC World Service. This is The Global Story.
The Oscars, the ultimate showcase of Hollywood pomp and pageantry. But behind
the glitzy red carpet photo-ops and tearful acceptance speeches,
a battle is raging for the hearts and minds of Academy Award voters.
Studios and streaming services are spending tens of millions of dollars to campaign for
their biggest films and brightest stars. We're asking who gets to decide who wins and who loses
the Oscars? Who gets to woo the voters? And are outsiders and newcomers getting left behind?
With me today is Tom Brook, BBC film journalist who's been covering the Oscars since 1982. He's
in Los Angeles right now preparing to cover this year's awards ceremony. How are you, Tom?
I'm well, I'm getting ready for the Oscars, trying to learn all kinds of
trivia that I need to know on the night. Here in the studio with me is Leila Latif,
a journalist and regular contributor to BBC Arts Coverage, who's also worked on
awards campaigns, including Will Smith's successful bid for Best Actor in 2022.
Hi Leila. Hi, lovely to be here.
How many Oscars have you either followed or been involved with?
Well, I grew up in Sudan, very much watching Tom's coverage of the Oscars, but I would stay
up every night, I think probably from the age of about seven. I don't think I've missed one.
I would kind of get up at about, I think 2am with the time difference there and watch them all,
because this was the time pre-YouTube. You had to watch them all. You had to watch Billy
Crystal do his big song-and-dance number in order to really kind of capture the magic.
Before we get into the Oscars and the campaigns, I have a very honest question to you both. Have
you ever stood in front of the mirror and delivered your own Oscars victory speech?
Tom? No, I know Kate
Winslet has done that, because she mentioned it in an acceptance speech. She'd held up some kind
of shampoo bottle in the shower and imagined it was an Oscar statuette. But, you know, I am
self-involved and narcissistic, so I definitely have tendencies in that direction. But no,
I've never fantasised about saying, "so you really love me", you know, like Sally Field did when she
won the Oscar. But it's a very tempting fantasy. I feel that I would do the antithesis of a classic
Oscar speech. Like, I'm most inspired by like a Joe Pesci basically just saying thanks and walking
off stage or even like a Paul Verhoeven showing up for his own Razzie acceptance speeches. I
think there's nothing better than like parking your ego at the door and just not doing that
kind of, you know, self-aggrandising. I have to confess, I've done in front
of the mirror, Oscar victory speeches, Nobel Prize winning speeches, Olympic gold medal top podiums,
you name it. There's something there in which I've thanked the Academy.
And Leila, you've worked as an insider, no longer an observer. What's it like to be on the inside?
I mean, it's fascinating, because you realise how much politics goes into any single person's
Oscar campaign. I mean, I've worked on a few and hopefully will work on many more.
Sometimes you get a last-minute push because they realise that the reaction to something is good,
and all of a sudden, they want to invest heavily in a performance because they think they've got
something and so there's a mad rush. Sometimes it's clearly so established and there's just
every kind of cog in the machine is building up to making sure that something is classic
Oscar-bait and positioning it as such. And then sometimes there's, you see the drop,
where something comes out and everybody assumed that this would be like a shoe-in and you just
sort of see the sort of air drain out of it, where it's just like oh okay yes we will no longer be
pushing for this, but you know as a journalist you're sort of, you know I've been hired to work
on these Oscar campaigns, but often you're sort of tacitly doing it. Like there'll just be a lot of
offers for talent time and you know, let's get lots of features on this, pushing for a lot of
coverage because they know that this is something that's going to position something for an Oscar.
I'm fascinated that you're speaking about this because isn't the publicity campaign
around it supposed to be a little kind of secret and oh, they just happen to
win organically without a campaign behind them? I think that would be a real disservice to a lot
of the film industry if that's what we thought happened. You know there's a lot of films that
don't get recognised for many many different reasons and a lot of those things are basically
money and politics. And so yeah, fundamentally this isn't like the Olympics we're not saying
who the fastest man in the world is, we're talking about favourites. But a lot of things
don't win and the reasons for that is not to do with whether or not they were worse or better,
a lot of that's down to campaigns and a lot of it's down to the kind of feeling in Hollywood
at the time. And so, if you, I think if you broaden what you think an Oscar is rewarding,
it actually becomes way more interesting. Okay, here on The Global Story,
we've actually on another episode looked at the intricacies of the US electoral
college in the United States that was nothing in comparison to the intricacies of Oscar voting,
so Tom take us behind the scenes, how does voting work in Hollywood in terms of who gets the awards?
Prior to the nominations, what happens is the actors vote to nominate actors,
directors vote to nominate directors. It's interesting to know this because it helps
you understand why, say, somebody like Greta Gerwig was snubbed. But at the nomination stage,
that's what happens. But everyone, every Academy member can vote for best picture. Then once
the nominations are established, most Academy members can vote for most nominees, except in
certain categories like Documentary Feature or International Feature, where you have to
prove that you've seen a certain number of films. Janet Gaynor may no longer be a household name,
but she is the answer to a trivia question, because she was the first ever winner of the
Academy Award for Best Actress in 1929. More than 50 years later, the BBC asked
her about that very first awards ceremony. You know, people have asked me, "Well, were
you impressed?" Well, of course, I was impressed, but it didn't have the build-up that it does now
with the nominations and all the excitement, and of course, I don't think the Academy knew that it
was going to mean so much at the box office. I don't think really that that's what it was
formed for at all. It was formed to purely honour the actors and actresses and the other people.
Janet Gaynor, the winner from 1929, who won without the build-up. Leila, you can't do that
anymore, there has to be build-up to win? Yeah, there has to be there and there's
all these kinds of awards precursors. So, you'll get something like a few years ago,
there was just this very set in stone set, where it was going to be Laura Dern, Renee Zellweger
and Brad Pitt and Joaquin Phoenix, and they won everything, but kind of this like quartet would
just go from award ceremony to award ceremony. Did they run out of things to say?
They definitely did, which is why I think Joaquin Phoenix went into kind of like the ethics of dairy
farming in his Oscar speech, but yeah sometimes they become kind of self-perpetuating myths
where we just establish quite early on who the winners are and then it's sort of fait accompli
by the time the Oscars start. Walk us through then the
process of launching an Oscars campaign. So, the first thing that you do is you figure out
where you're going to be positioning yourself in the calendar. The best time is normally considered
autumn. That often means a Venice Film Festival launch, that has become sort of the place where a
lot of the Oscar winners now position themselves. I could do that, yeah. I'm free in the autumn.
You could be free? Yeah, so that's easy, clear the diary.
Yeah, your sort of Power of the Dog, your King Richard, which was at Telluride, Toronto around
then. There's this kind of period sweet spot in autumn, which is like Venice, Telluride,
Toronto, SFX, where a lot of these things get launched. Then you start your marketing campaign,
where you're going to kind of be getting a lot of press for these people. You're going to try
and single out the people that you think are your big contenders. So, let's say something
like Oppenheimer, which admittedly was a little bit earlier in the calendar. It's a huge cast and
you know that you're going to split the vote if you have too many people going for Best Supporting
Actor. So, you pick one and you send Robert Downey Jr out to do as much Best Supporting stuff to kind
of establish himself as like the one, if that makes sense. Then you start paying money. You
start paying for sponsored concert, the sort of thing that I do. And then by the time you get to,
I think normally end of November, early December, you start sending out swag.
What is the swag? Who gives it? Who gets it? So, we're not talking like in the golden days of
the Golden Globes where like they would fly you to Paris. It might be jumpers, it might be tote bags,
it might be water bottles, copies of the script, vinyl of the soundtrack, things like that. But
at the end of the day, it doesn't, it's not going to entirely convince your mind.
And it goes to the voters. I'm a very lowly person in
the whole Academy Awards machine. I'm a member of the Critics Choice group and I get loads of swag
starting in about November and as you might gather by what I m about to say, I'm a total hypocrite. I
mean, you know, it's like, rubbish, I mean, the politically correct part of myself is, I say,
how can these production companies spend all this money? I mean, it's very lavish. I get wine,
chocolate, all kinds of weird items of clothing. And, you know, as you're saying, it does make you
think about the film, but it's a total waste of resources. But then I have to say, I love
the chocolate. So, I just go ahead and think ok chocolate, you know, will I vote for Maestro? No,
I hope to goodness it doesn't influence me. Tom, given that you've been on the circuit
since 1982, have you seen the campaigns, the swag to a certain extent, have you seen that all change
and get more overwhelming or more professional? Yes, it's definitely become more professional.
And I think that, I mean, Harvey Weinstein manufactured this kind of whispering campaign
against his rival at the Oscars, which was Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan. And I mean, you
had this, and he used a lot of people to lobby and pressure Academy members. And it heralded a new
age in terms of campaigning, one that personally I don't think is healthy. But as a result, you know,
Shakespeare in Love won big, Gwyneth Paltrow won big, I think people will remember her being very
emotional, and Judi Dench won, and she was only in the film for about seven or eight minutes.
Is it the studio who picks which actors to go for, or might it just be the actor who says,
you know what, I was really good in that film, I think it's my turn?
Yeah, I mean, certainly there's like, you know, people that just shine in small roles, you know,
thinking of Ke Huy Quan. I don't think that was, when A24 was making that anybody thought like, oh,
great, that is going to be like Oscar gold. You know, sometimes people do establish themselves and
that's when you get that mad scramble afterwards to kind of like position these people as the one
to watch. But these things are still decided and when it comes to kind of larger stars,
these things are in their contracts. Does that create a system in which
newcomers are left out a little bit? Oh yes, no, certainly for sure. There's,
connections are everything. So even, there's the people at the top who are making the decision
about what is Oscar worthy and those tend to be people that are a little bit on the conservative
side and kind of want to, I suppose, like maintain the status quo. But then even when it comes to
sort of organic things, who has the sort of people that they all kind of praise because a
lot of it comes down to social media engagement now and amplifying certain voices and stuff,
so I think in a strange way it's gotten harder. What is Oscar worthy?
There's kind of established ideas around what is Oscar worthy or Oscar-bait. Biopics
do extremely well if you're able to, you know, disappear into the transformation, you know,
into a transformation of a beloved figure. That's a good one. Weirdly playing the Joker.
Yeah, playing the Joker is pretty good, isn't it? It's pretty good, that, I mean, they're basically,
the numbers are like what, about 70 per cent? Yeah, that's a good hit rate. If you're Jack
Nicholson, you're like, "Yeah, come on, I need a back award for that."
And then I think there's, you know, when it comes to the films themselves,
World War II is always a safe bet. But also films about the magic of moviemaking.
Oh, okay. That appeals to the voters. Yes, like at the end of the day,
they're quite self-aggrandising as events go, and I think we all do love to kind of,
you know, even myself tangentially being in this industry, do love to kind of have a bit
of a boost about why what we do matters so much. The Oscars have been criticised for many years
for not being diverse among the voters and also among the nominees and the winners picked by the
voters. Leila, how's that being addressed, in terms of the voting body and the winners?
Well, there's been a big attempt to expand the votership. The sort of people that get included
and that's a slow process. I mean, they've made strides and I think that you've seen that in terms
of the sorts of films that have won of late, but there's still a kind of core body and a bit of a
groupthink, that I think you can see a lot of the time in the nominees. I'm fascinated that the same
awards body that gave Moonlight Best Picture one year, gave it to Green Book the following year,
that we literally did like the most incredible masterpiece of black cinema and then we did white
saviour the next year and what a metaphor that is. You know, these things don't exist in a bubble,
and I don't think you can entirely put it to, kind of new minority members to kind of save the
Oscars. You actually I think have to challenge the minds of the status quo of the majority of
people that are not only voting for these things, but also, the people that are deciding who the
push goes for as to who is, you know, at the forefront of the conversation for the Oscars.
Leila, it's been fantastic to have you right here in the studio and to anyone listening,
not watching, we have these kinds of mini-Oscars with us. How many do we
have? About seven. You're collecting them all at the moment. Come on, do your speech.
In the words of Joe Pesci, it's an honour. Thanks. My speech, I'd like to thank the Academy. It's
just, I don't know if I deserve this, but I'll take it anyway.
Tom, we haven't couriered you a mini-Oscar, but would you like
to deliver your farewell Oscar speech? Well, I'd like to thank everybody who I've
ever met in my life, who has given me a little bit of love and made me feel better about myself,
enabling me to go forward. Tom, many thanks.
Thank you. Leila, many thanks.
Pleasure. And thank you for being with us.
If you liked our episode and want to hear more of The Global Story, do find us wherever you get your
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