The Truth About The Oscars

On the evening of March 21st, 1999, an expectant hush descended upon Los Angeles’ Dorothy Chandler Pavilion as Harrison Ford walked onto the stage.

The beloved leading man was moments away from presenting the 71s Academy Awards’ final – and arguably most important – accolade before a restless crowd: Best Picture.

Throughout that year’s awards season, it had been a neck-and-neck battle between John Madden’s Shakespeare in Love and Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan; the former edging the latter by 13 Oscar nods to 11. To the point that the other nominees – Elizabeth, Life Is Beautiful, and Terence Malick’s The Thin Red Line – invariably took a back seat in the conversation.

Momentum appeared to be on the side of the universally acclaimed war epic with an unforgettable opening sequence. The greatest “omen” was that Spielberg himself had already nabbed Best Director earlier in the ceremony. To date, 70 of the 97 Best Picture winners have been preceded by its driving creative force taking home a golden statuette; and only six films have ever won without a Best Director nomination to accompany it at all.

In fact, just a few years prior, Steven Spielberg pulled off this textbook sweep: Best Director and Best Picture for Schindler’s List. By all accounts, history was about to repeat itself in spectacular fashion – right down to the category presenter (Ford also personally handed his Indiana Jones collaborator the top honour in 1994).

What occurred instead would be immortalised within the pantheon of Academy Award-related controversies.

After a visibly disappointed Harrison Ford announced Shakespeare in Love, a posse that included then Miramax studio head and now disgraced Hollywood executive Harvey Weinstein took to the stage.

From those in attendance to the viewers at home, it was clear as day that nobody enjoyed basking in the glory more than the man identified as a vile sexual predator. In a rather telling move, Weinstein even elbowed fellow producer and acclaimed filmmaker, Edward Zwick (Glory, The Last Samurai, Blood Diamond), out of the way to seize the mic.

A gross deviation from the agreed plan, according to Zwick himself, who regretted missing his chance at shoving old Harvey “over the edge of the stage into the orchestra pit” with the world as his witness; and a salting of a still-weeping wound, given Zwick was the original director of Shakespeare in Love before Miramax as a company elbowed him out of the way for John Madden.

Make no mistake – this wasn’t the hot-hand fallacy in action. Or the triumph of an indie “underdog” that certain folks would have you believe. It was a sustained campaign of underhanded social machinations, masterminded and bankrolled by a notorious industry bully who would irrevocably damage the landscape.

It would also mark the beginning of a decline in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ credibility.

Best Picture Voting Explained

Before we proceed, it’s worth understanding how the Best Picture winner is decided. Because, unlike the rest of the categories, for some bewildering reason, it isn’t about whichever film earns the most votes.

According to the Academy’s own rulebook:

Voting members rank the Best Picture nominees – 1 to 10 – from their favourite to their least favourite. The film that gets 50% or more of the votes is the winner. If one movie doesn’t get 50% out of the gate, the one with the fewest votes is eliminated, and the members who voted for that as their top choice have their votes added to the film that was next on their list. What happens if their second choice was the one that was eliminated? Well, their votes then go to their third choice, and so on. That process continues until one movie gets 50% or more of all the votes.

The other kicker?

Although they are encouraged to do so, there’s also no rule dictating that Academy members are strictly required to watch the nominated films. Meaning there’s room for, shall we say, external persuasion (i.e. getting to hang with the cool kids).

Ballots are tallied by the beancounters from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).

The Anatomy of a Downfall

While Shakespeare in Love wasn’t the first questionable Best Picture, it certainly wasn’t the last. And in the years since, the cadence has been ratcheted up to a degree where it’s now more surprising when a film actually deserves the win (like Sean Baker’s Anora).

What was so groundbreaking about The Shape of Water and Green Book compared to, say, Call Me By Your Name, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, and BlacKkKlansman?

Is anyone really sitting down on a Sunday afternoon to rewatch Nomadland and CODA?

And with my dying breath, I will maintain that both Cate Blanchett and Todd Field’s Tár – by far the most masterfully crafted performance and film of the 2022 nominees, respectively – were robbed in every sense of the term. Incidentally, Ms Blanchett would also contentiously lose Best Actress to Shakespeare in Love’s Gwyneth Paltrow during that fateful 1999 ceremony.

Instead, an embarrassment of riches was heaped upon what essentially amounted to an A24-produced Marvel movie for people who weren’t familiar with Wong Kar-Wai; and people who routinely tank dinner parties with vocabularies polluted by modern therapy-speak (probably gleaned from an elective study unit at Sydney University).

If questioning the validity of Michelle Yeoh’s long-awaited victory makes me a bad Chinese, so be it. But I digress…

Even before #MeToo, Harvey Weinstein’s relentless nature wasn’t a secret. This went beyond winning at all costs. Where there was a Weinstein, there was a way. And the “way” was part bloodsport, part political campaign, as described by Michael Schulman (via BBC) – author of Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, & Tears.

To his credit, there is indeed an art form to it, and marketing budget aside, one cannot simply “buy” a Best Picture win. Just ask Netflix: the streamer disclosed some US$25 million of promotional outlay for Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma back in 2019 (though pundits estimate it was actually closer to US$40-60 million) only for it to lose to Green Book and fade into cultural obscurity shortly thereafter.

So what works?

Weinstein took the schmoozing of Mary Pickford’s voting committee tea party circa 1930 to unprecedented heights by pioneering a barrage approach that virtually left no opinion unturned. Something that would come to blur the lines of merit and redefine the accepted rules of engagement.

With the widespread adoption of VHS, voters were suddenly receiving copies of Miramax pictures to view from the comfort of their homes (a practice that was quickly adopted across the board). Special screenings were also another key battleground – including in a retirement home for Academy members, per BBC – with actors and actresses paraded out for luncheons, panels, as well as those infamous self-hosted Hollywood parties.

Outside of the conventional plays for influence and into guerrilla marketing territory, Harvey Weinstein orchestrated demanding tours from his talent. For his inaugural Oscars push with My Left Foot, he ensured that Daniel Day-Lewis appeared in Washington DC to support the thematically compatible Americans with Disabilities Act; a special screening was also arranged for House and Senate members.

“It all began with Harvey,” an unnamed publicist of a Shakespeare in Love actor told Vanity Fair.

“I don’t remember ever feeling pressure like that from other studios. He was like, ‘Can you do these radio call-ins all morning?’ He calls the clients directly and guilts them. He really was kind of a beast.”

Mark Gill, president of Miramax (Los Angeles) at the time of Shakespeare in Love, explained: “This was not saying to the stars, ‘OK you can go on a couple of talk shows to open the movie and do a weekend of interviews at a junket and thanks so much for helping.’ That was just ‘Good morning. You’ve got three more months of shaking hands and kissing babies in you.’”

“For Shakespeare in Love, we used the playbook for The English Patient – turbocharged, on steroids,” Gill added elsewhere in an oral history of the campaign.

“It was just absolutely murderous the whole way through. I mean, the hours were ridiculous and the demands were insane, just unbelievably crazy stuff.”

A paradigm shift, sure, but it was not prohibited. In a move that did toe the line of Academy regulations, however, Weinstein made a point to manufacture negative press. In this case, it involved denigrating Saving Private Ryan to journalists behind closed doors, subversively peddling the idea that all it had going for itself was the opening 25 minutes (and that was all anyone needed to see).

To this day, it isn’t uncommon for media controversy surrounding the favourites – warranted or otherwise – to be conveniently stirred up leading into the Oscars.

Once upon a time, it was accusations of antisemitism against Josh Nash, the famed mathematician who was the subject of A Beautiful Mind starring Russell Crowe. For this year’s 97th Academy Awards, the scandal crop entailed using of artificial intelligence in Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, which threatened Adrien Brody’s chances of becoming a two-time winner for Best Actor; along with the incendiary past tweets of Emilia Perez star Karla Sofia Gascon.

The year after Shakespeare in Love’s upset victory, studios – both major and independent – assimilated some form of the Miramax blueprint into their own award-season campaigning playbook. And for his steamrolling tactics, Harvey Weinstein was rewarded with 81 Oscar wins over the course of his career.

Hope For The Future?

2025 represented a mixed bag.

While several worthy nominees from Adrien Brody and Mikey Madison to Anora director Sean Baker (x4) and Conclave screenwriter Peter Straughan took home a golden statuette along with a US$220,000 gift bag… there was the matter of Emilia Perez.

The Jacques Audiard-helmed musical about the titular Mexican cartel leader (Karla Sofía Gascón) who aims to disappear and transition into a woman with the help of her lawyer Rita Mora Castro (2025 Best Supporting Actress Zoe Saldaña) is a classic example of the recurring divide between film critics and the everyday audience.

That is to politely say: it’s utter dogs**t.

Setting aside the racial and gender politics, despite such memorable lines of dialogue as “My f**king pussy even hurts thinking about you” and the entirely laughable sequence embedded below, this masterclass in cinematic incompetence of the highest order led the pack with a historic 13 nominations (including Best Picture) – the most a non-English-language submission has ever received.

What’s even more confounding than the nominations voting is the almost-uniform industry kudos from the reputable likes of James Cameron and Denis Villeneuve. Thankfully, it only secured Best Supporting Actress and Best Original Song. Though still not without ruffling feathers.

So long as there’s an Anora, Oppenheimer, and Parasite for every Emilia Perez, Maestro, and The Irishman, there’s hope for the Academy Awards yet. But at the current trend, there may very well come a day when the storied prestige event drums itself away from legitimacy and into a death spiral of self-congratulation.