WORDS Eoin McCague

ILLUSTRATION Alice Wilson

The whispers began weeks before its debut. Analysts armed themselves, preparing for a systemic shift in bookies’s odds, while other studios recalculated their marketing accordingly. For days there was radio silence, followed by the vocal pundits; it couldn’t be that good, they claimed, could it? Then finally the news was confirmed in Telluride. It was over, time for the competitors to go home. 12 Years a Slave had the Oscar race sewn-up. It was 30 August 2013, 194 days until the statues would be handed out in Dolby Theatre and already the mechanisms of the beast that is the awards season campaign trail were in full swing. Director Steve McQueen along with actors Chiwetel Ejiofor and Lupita Nyong’o were instantly ubiquitous. McQueen’s past as an art-school rebel was unearthed and thrashed around the media, while the influence of everything from his Ghanaian ancestry to his residence in Amsterdam on his film was rigorously deconstructed on the internet. Nyong’o quickly emerged as a style icon, and was embraced by the fashion world, appearing on the covers of Dazed & Confused, Vogue Italia and Vanity Fair, as well as the Miu Miu Spring 2014 campaign. Ejiofor meanwhile was suddenly everyone’s dark horse; “the most underrated actor of his generation” adorned the cover of numerous magazines as everybody claimed to have spotted him first. Only one man stood apart from the hysteria that surrounded the package that 12 Years a Slave had become, Michael Fassbender. Clearly (and justifiably) bitter from his 2011 Oscar shutout wherein he campaigned tirelessly for a Best Actor nod for his work in Shame, Fassbender, while appearing at every press junket to heap praise on his director and co-stars, adamantly declared he will stay apart from the circus that is the campaign trail.

“It emerged that Broughton had sent personalised emails to roughly 70 of the branch’s 239 members. For the first time in its history, the Academy revoked an Oscar nomination, citing improper campaigning.”

But it’s not a circus; if anything, the 2014 Oscar race has shown it’s a slaughterhouse. A Best Original Song nomination for Alone Yet Not Alone, a film released in only nine American cities? How could this little known composition emerge from seemingly nowhere to join the ranks of U2 and Pharrell Williams, while denying the likes of Lana Del Rey and Taylor Swift their first nominations? Once it was revealed that Bruce Broughton, a long time Academy member of the music branch, was the song’s composer the answer became clear. Understanding (better than most) the major financial boost an Oscar nomination can bring to a film even if it has little chance of winning, it emerged that Broughton had sent personalised emails to roughly 70 of the branch’s 239 members. For the first time in its history, the Academy revoked an Oscar nomination, citing improper campaigning by Broughton. The composer has recently cried foul in the press, stating he was merely drawing attention to the gulf that has emerged between Hollywood studios and independent financiers in terms of campaigning on the awards season trail. “They had previews and parties and huge promotions,” Broughton said of his (former) fellow nominees. “We had no budget. There’s no Oscar campaign.”

But it’s not enough to just have a campaign in this slaughterhouse. You have to be prepared to roll with the punches. Pick up any recent interview with Best Actor frontrunner Matthew McConaughey and you will invariably find him dismissing allegations that Ronald Woodroof was bisexual and probably contracted AIDS through homosexual sex. McConaughey’s Dallas Buyers Club portrays Woodroof as a homophobe who contracted the disease through intravenous drug use. This hasn’t dampened the desires of rival studios to tarnish the film’s chances in March. Similar claims of factual error were also made by the family of William Ford, a slave owner portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch. They argue the film was innacurately represented their ancestor, described in Solomon Northup’s autobiography as a kind, caring, Christian man who just so happened to condone slavery. The 12 Years camp has yet to respond to these allegations.

It is impossible to talk about awards season hysteria without mentioning one man, but surprisingly 2013 was a quiet year for the pioneer of the modern Oscar campaign, Harvey Weinstein. His bag of tricks for securing nominations is legendary (this is the man who once got Shakespeare in Love enough votes to beat Saving Private Ryan for Best Picture) and the results speak for themselves, with his films securing more than 300 Academy Award nominations to date. His first big campaign came in 1989 with Jim Sheridan’s My Left Foot, wherein he convinced Sheridan and producer Noel Pearson to move to L.A. from Dublin, so that they could more easily attend the numerous meet-and-greets with Academy members. He even persuaded Best Actor nominee Daniel Day-Lewis to testify in the Senate for the Disability Act (ironically Day-Lewis also presented his film Lincoln to Congress last year in a bid for publicity). In 2009 when Slumdog Millionaire was suddenly hit with negative press implying the filmmakers had exploited the movie’s Indian child actors, many assumed Weinstein (who was backing The Reader) was behind it. Last year, he secretly hired Obama’s deputy campaign manager to help with the campaign for David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook. Weinstein’s only player for Best Picture this year is the dark horse Philomena, expected to trouble John Ridley’s (12 Years a Slave) clean sweep of Best Adapted Screenplay awards, but little else. Instead, 2013 saw the rise of a new super producer, Megan Ellison, daughter of billionaire Larry Ellison. Ellison’s Annapurna Pictures for years now has quietly been churning high-quality, auteur-driven films that contemporary Hollywood studios are frankly too scared to finance. With two Best Picture nominees in Her and American Hustle, the 28-year-old has announced her presence on the world stage in a big way. Only time will tell if she will adopt Weinstein’s proven methods of whisper campaigns and old-school cold calling in her bid for Oscar glory.

And maybe she shouldn’t. Perhaps the campaigning should be left to the politicians and we should adopt a Woody Allen-like approach to the “circus”. Perhaps we should keep in mind what Ejiofor recently said when commenting on his film’s campaigning and buzz, “I love the film. I think it’s a really strong piece of work. But I also want people to come to it without all the buzz and the hype and this and that. I do feel it needs to be engaged within its own quiet, reflective way.”