Oscar Scandal Season Heats Up...A Matter Of Life And Death
March 16, 2003
Huge campaign ads purchased in
newspapers, crafted mailers with catchy candidate pitches, black tie promotional
soirées, mud slinging and word of mouth media blitzes enticing every magazine
and newspaper hack with an audience to resonate a line for that one particular
nominee… no… its isn’t time to for the presidential or congressional races,… it is
time for the Oscars. On March 23rd,
2003, actors, actresses, directors, and various other movie craft persons will
grace the stage of the Kodak Theater in Hollywood California, collect there
gold statuette and ironically announce to the audience and world, that they
were just happy to be nominated. In what should be an evening where awards are
bestowed to nominees based on merit and work, the true value of aggressive and
costly ad campaigns really comes to light. Sometimes crossing the lines of
shameless self-promotion, into outright voter tampering; a yearly issue facing
Academy Award Executives that actually has required organizers to appoint
persons in charge of monitoring the campaign activities and possible violations
of studios. This season, amid the regular ad campaigns and
finger pointing, Ric Robertson, executive administrator of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has become
aware of "several disturbing campaign acts," he said. "Among
those are the private parties to which members are being invited, in order to
press the flesh with various nominees."
"Since many of the members in
question don't even know the hosts or anyone connected to these parties, we can
only assume that they're being invited solely because of their status as voting
members of the Academy. That is a clear violation of our guidelines."
And in continuing with a fast approaching Oscar date, other
more certain violations have stirred commotion among Oscar voters, causing Miramax Films to pull its ads featuring an
opinion column that called on them to give Martin Scorsese
an Academy Award for directing Gangs of New
York. A column written by the Oscar-winning director,
and former president of the Academy Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Robert Wise had been
reprinted in advertisements that appeared in Hollywood trades, the Los Angeles
Times and The New York Times.
Academy President Frank Pierson: "It's an outright violation of academy rules. It's a
corruption of the process."
In the past, the Academy has taken away tickets for violating
Academy rules. A punishment considered severe to people in the industry.
However, in an extreme case of Academy rule violations, a nominated movie can
also be declared ineligible but to date, that has never happened. As an interesting side bar, one possible reason for such intense
nominee campaigning could be linked to a little known 2 year old study
conducted by a Dr. Don
Redelmeier, deSouza chair in clinical trauma research at U of T and Sunnybrook
and Women's College Health Sciences Center. In the study he has found that
Academy Award winners live almost four years longer than their less recognized
peers. The study, published in an early
2001 edition of the Annals of Internal Medicine, examined the life
expectancy of nominated and winning performers over the 73-year-history of the
Academy Awards. The research was conducted by looking at nominated movies and
comparing actors or actresses that had major roles in those same films. A total
of 1,649 performers were grouped according to whether they won, were nominated
and never won, or were never nominated. The study, which was funded by the
Ontario Ministry of Health and Long Term Care and the Canadian Institutes of
Health Research found that: "Performers who
won Academy Awards had a life span of 79.7 years, compared to 75.8 years for
those who did not win. Survival for those who were nominated but did not win
was about the same as for those who were never nominated. Actors with many
nominations had no advantage over those with single nominations and there was
no difference in survival between supporting and leading roles. However,
winners had a 22 per cent reduction in mortality for each additional Oscar." So there we have it folks. Oscar
night is more then awards and accolades, more then sequin gowns and tuxedos,
more then the red carpet and Joan Rivers… the Oscars are a matter of
life… and… death… George W. Horta III Additional Sources: www.cbsnews.com
www.utoronto.ca
Source: www.cnn.com
Filed under: Gangs of New York