1. Campaign like Tracy Flick
Awards campaigning used to consist of studios taking out “For Your Consideration” ads in Variety. Now it’s a long-term battle plan, beginning with the autumn film festivals (Venice, Telluride, Toronto) and continuing with special screenings, parties, cast/crew Q&As and mass mailouts of screener DVDs to voters. “One of the keys is to have your people around for certain industry gatherings,” says Variety’s awards editor Tim Gray, “like the Governors’ Awards [the Academy’s lifetime achievement awards, in November]: basically there’s 800 Oscar voters in the room, so publicists want to make sure their people are there.” Does it make a difference? Sorry to Bother You director Boots Riley tweeted: “The largest factor as to why we didn’t get nominated is that we didn’t actually run a campaign … Without that, it’s perceived that you don’t have a chance.” Gray isn’t so sure. “Olivia Colman, she’s working,” he says, “so she did not participate much in the nomination process, whereas Sam Elliott, he was everywhere, doing a million Q&As and parties. Both got nominated.”
2. No such thing as bad publicity
Bohemian Rhapsody alone is proof that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. The multiple firings, recastings and allegations against director Bryan Singer should have been the kiss of death, but they kept the movie in the headlines (as did the pun-friendliness of Queen’s back catalogue). Green Book’s screenwriter had to apologise for an Islamophobic tweet, and the movie was criticised for being “full of lies” by relatives of its subject, Don Shirley. Again, that didn’t hurt it. A Star Is Born could bank on Lady Gaga speaking her mind at regular intervals – condemning Mike Pence and his wife as “the worst representation” of Christianity, for instance. Even Roma got plenty of free coverage for its controversial, Netflix-based release strategy. More positive buzz was available: Black Panther was a genuine cultural event.
3. Don’t be pale, male and stale
#OscarSoWhite? Oh no, you must be thinking of a different Oscar. The Academy’s new, diverse membership is super-keen to show that things have changed now, hence this year’s rainbow nation of nominees. Three films foregrounding African Americans, Roma creating the first indigenous Mexican best actress nominee, LGBT major characters in Bohemian Rhapsody, Green Book, Vice, Can You Ever Forgive Me? and (in an 18th-century kind of way) The Favourite. And the refreshingly multicultural Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is tipped to win animated feature.
4. Don’t fight the power
Hot-button issues such as race, class and conservative politics ruining the world are so much more palatable when addressed at arm’s length, in the Academy’s view. Only one best picture nominee is set entirely in the present day: A Star Is Born. The rest are literally history. Vice targets the Republican arch-baddies of US politics past, almost as a proxy for the Republican arch-baddies of the present. Green Book’s story of cross-racial buddyhood is safely sealed off in the 1960s. BlacKkKlansman almost does the same, until Spike Lee connects his 1970s story to the now with a jolting ending. Lee knows very well how “telling it like it is” scares off voters: that was why Driving Miss Daisy scooped the Oscars in 1990 while Do the Right Thing got nothing.
5. Brand yourself like Don Draper
Getting a movie made at all these days depends on giving punters what they already know. And very few of this year’s nominees were really brand new propositions: pop star biopic (Bohemian Rhapsody), remake (A Star Is Born), comic-book movie (Black Panther), English royalty (The Favourite), famous assholes (Vice). The bolder, braver films of 2019 (Leave No Trace, You Were Never Really Here, Hereditary, Sorry to Bother You, etc) didn’t get a look-in.
Composite: Allstar/Twentieth Century Fox; Allstar/Film4; Annapurna Pictures; Focus Features; Warner Bros; CBS Films/Rex
