How do you win an Oscar? The art of the campaign
- Ash
- Feb 28
- 11 min read
It will come as no surprise that I love watching the Oscars (formally known as the Academy Awards and no one really knows why they’re referred to as the Oscars!). As a teenager, I watched the full 3 to 4 hour telecast — including the red carpet — religiously. If you’re even the slightest bit committed to film and TV, you’ll be aware that we’re in the midst of the juggernaut that is “awards season.” And “season” is, quite frankly, a misnomer — as early as the day after the Oscars, people will be trying to guess the potential winners of next year’s.
I love the Oscars because they’re a celebration of my favourite art form. The ceremony, when done well, is funny, glamorous and earnest in all the right ways. Sure, it might seem self-congratulatory and a bit saccharine but such is show business! I’ll never pretend to be above any of this. I was incredibly excited by “Oppenheimer” winning Best Picture last year because I treat the Oscars much like Rotten Tomatoes scores: when we’re aligned, it’s the perfect barometer of taste and when we’re not, it’s a flawed institution. Strong opinions, loosely held!
In preparation for this year’s big day, I thought I’d give an overview of what it takes to take home a little gold man. This awards season has no clear winner as of yet: “The Brutalist” and “Emilia Perez” may have the most nominations but have also been the subjects of the biggest controversies of the season. Adding more uncertainty: “Anora” recently won big at the Directors Guild Awards, and everyone freaking loves the messy popes in “Conclave.” In previous years, the winners were apparent so far ahead of the ceremony (which occurs later and later each year, protracting the whole affair) that it has sometimes felt a bit boring. I’m on the edge of my seat this year which is thrilling. Let’s dive in!
Established in 1929, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is home to a global membership of more than 10,500 of the most accomplished film industry artists and leaders, across 18 branches. The branches range from acting, directing, cinematography, film editing, costume design, sound, hair and makeup, and more.
Academy of Motion Pictures website
A Beginner’s Guide to Awards Season
I would like to dispel the myth that the Academy Awards of Merit (official title) go to the best performance/best movie/best score. How can something as subjective as film be categorised and classified? There were 19,247 movies released last year, according to IMDb. Did the Academy voters see every single one of them in order to determine the best? I highly doubt it. So how do they decide?
I believe that the Oscar goes to… the best campaign. Who, over the course of the awards season (and even during a film’s press tour) had the most compelling story? The voters are only human after all, and they respond to being charmed just like the rest of us. Often, Hollywood reporters will remark on how fun the cast of “Everything Everywhere All At Once” and “CODA” were at all the parties. People vote for people they like. “Parasite” is often cited as the last great Best Picture winner. The movie was expertly-made and pretty popular (many of my friends had actually seen it), it was a truly surprising win as it was a foreign-language international feature. But also, everyone loved Bong Joon Ho and his cast! Often if there’s huge support for a film, everywhere it is nominated people will likely vote for it . For instance: Jamie Lee Curtis winning Best Supporting Actress for “Everything Everywhere All At Once” against strong competitors such as Angela Bassett in “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” Kerry Condon in “Banshees of Inisherin,” and her “EEAAO” co-star Stephanie Hsu (Hsu deserved it more, in my opinion, but ultimately lost to Curtis’s status as a little-recognised Hollywood legend, a powerful message as we’ll see below).
There are also handy precursor awards such as the Directors’, Producer and Screen Actors Guild Awards. The BAFTAs sometimes align with the Oscars but not consistently enough to serve as true predictors. Not only are the precursor awards good indicators of which films are garnering support or losing momentum (the same people voting for them are broadly voting for the Oscars), they’re also an audition for “the best speech.” If you’re smart about it and memorable then people will want to hear you speak again. Demi Moore demonstrated this beautifully at this year’s Golden Globes. She had a clear narrative of a Hollywood legend who has starred in iconic movies we love (“Ghost”, “A Few Good Men”, “Charlie’s Angels Full Throttle”), but has ultimately been let down by the system. Her Oscar nomination gives Hollywood an opportunity to right those wrongs! Going into award season, Mikey Madison (“Anora”) was the clear favourite for Best Actress but with one heartfelt, moving and honest speech, Moore found herself in the lead, and carried “The Substance” to a Best Picture nomination despite horror being a famously shut-out genre within the Academy, more on this later.
Best Actress is usually a bloodbath every year which is ironic considering how many women get to lead movies, although last year was a step in the right direction as 50% of the highest grossing movies were led by women for the first time in recent history. It’s because of this historic lack of parity that Best Actress nominations are rarely reflected in the Best Picture nominations (Best Picture movies have historically centered on men.) This year, however, is a refreshing change: All the Best Actress nominees are in Best Picture-nominated movies – what did Jo March say? WOMEN.
The 2024 nominations faced controversy not seen for some time since Harvey Weinstein’s infamous Oscar campaigns. Last year, Andrea Riseborough was nominated for “To Leslie” despite the movie (and her performance) having almost no presence in any other awards lists. It was an ALLEGED grassroots campaign organised on her behalf by celebrities including Kate Winslet, Amy Adams and Gwyneth Paltrow. The campaign consisted of numerous celebrities taking to social media to be effusive about “To Leslie” and Riseborough’s performance including, an Instagram post that specifically referenced other actresses, which is against Academy guidelines. Following the Academy’s investigation, Riseborough got to keep her nomination but the Academy announced plans to address “social media and outreach campaigning tactics that caused concern”.
Normally one would relish this upheaval of the typical awards season order, however, the means through which this was achieved and the shut-out of Viola Davis and Danielle Deadwyler, left a bad taste in people’s mouths. We can never truly know to what extent these practices have in securing nominations and whether one actress getting in means a miss for another. For all we know, number six on that list wasn’t Deadwyler or Davis, although the previous awards’ nominations suggest otherwise. The Academy does have a continuing streak of nominating predominantly white films and performances, shattering the illusion that the historic win for “Parasite” heralded change in the Academy’s voting tendencies.
What Kinds of Movies Win Best Picture?
The general consensus is that “genre movies” don’t fare well at the Oscars and specifically in the Best Picture race. I find the term “genre movie,” often used by film critics, intriguing since surely all movies have a genre? The term encompasses horror, science fiction, fantasy, action, comic book and thriller movies – all of which struggle in the Best Picture category.
Thrillers used to be an Academy favourite, especially in the ‘90s when both “Silence of the Lamb” and “American Beauty” won Best Picture, so either thrillers have gotten worse or the Academy believes themselves above these now. There is a belief that many of the Best Picture winners aren’t movies that most people have actually seen, which makes the Oscars feel a bit pretentious. But Academy voters face a dilemma: nominate, and award, films that are broadly seen (“Dune”, “Barbie”, “Black Panther”, “Wicked”) or uplift smaller films that would get a significant boost from the recognition (“Nomadland”, “Nickel Boys”, “I’m Still Here”)?
Broadly, the Oscars favour the following types of movies:
Movies about war
All Quiet on the Western Front - winner 1929
Casablanca - winner 1943
The Deer Hunter - winner 1978
Platoon - winner 1986
Schindler’s list - winner 1993
The English Patient - winner 1996
The Hurt Locker - winner 2009
Movies about real people/events
The Life of Emile Zola - winner 1937
Gandhi - winner 1982
Amadeus - winner 1984
Titanic - winner 1997
A Beautiful Mind - winner 2001
The King’s Speech - winner 2010
Argo - winner 2012
12 Years a Slave - winner 2013
Spotlight - winner 2015
Oppenheimer - winner 2024
Movies about crime
On the Waterfront - winner 1954
Midnight Cowboy - winner 1969
The Godfather - winner 1972
The Godfather Part II - winner 1974 (the rare sequel win)
The Departed - winner 2007 (the only Best Picture award given to Scorsese and it’s not even his best, I CRY)
Musicals - particularly in the heyday of the Musical in the 60s, you might as well have not made any other movie genre
An American in Paris - winner 1951
Gigi - winner 1958
West Side Story - winner 1961
My Fair Lady - winner 1964
Sound of Music - winner 1965
Oliver! - winner 1968
Chicago - winner 2002
“Talky” movies where “nothing really happens” - romances could really get by on this back in the day but would struggle now
It Happened One Night - winner 1934
All About Eve - winner 1950
The Apartment - winner 1960
Annie Hall - winner 1977
Kramer vs Kramer - winner 1979
Moonlight - winner 2016
Nomadland - winner 2020
“Epic” movies
Gone with the Wind - winner 1939
Around the World in 80 Days - winner 1956
Ben-Hur - winner 1959
Lawrence of Arabia - winner 1962
Chariots of Fire - winner 1981
Braveheart - winner 1995
Gladiator - winner 2000
How the Modern Oscars Campaign Came to Be
I hate to speak his name but unfortunately one cannot discuss Oscar campaigning without mentioning Weinstein, whose campaign practices were so aggressive that the Academy had to respond by creating new rules. He is credited with one of the most controversial Best Picture winners “Shakespeare in Love” beating Stephen Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan” in the 1999 awards in a surprising upset. As previously established, The Oscars LOVE A MOVIE ABOUT WAR.
Weinstein’s production company Miramax, which was more of an indie studio at the time, didn’t have the kind of money that large studios like Warners Brothers or 20th Century Fox had, so he sent screeners of his movies to everybody and made actors available for interviews about the movie for months and months ahead of voting. As Michael Schulman, author of “Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat and Tears,” described:
“There's two parts of a political campaign," says Schulman. "There's the messaging and there's the ground game. And in the 90s, Weinstein did both really well."
I mentioned messaging, in relation to Moore’s campaign, above: what does this nomination/win say about us? Schulman goes on to describe that the Academy voters of 1999 found “Shakespeare in Love” to be a “breath of fresh air” in contrast to Spielberg’s tale of war. Spielberg and DreamWorks (the studio that produced the film, which was co-owned by Spielberg) felt it was a story that sold itself, because again, Hollywood can’t get enough of movies about war. They severely misjudged the mood at the time, evidently. The “mood” can have a greater sway than people anticipate for instance AppleTV’s CODA winning over — and thus delaying Netflix’s deeply anticipated first Best Picture win — “The Power of the Dog,” the frontrunner in 2021. It makes sense, we were still in the thick of the pandemic and “CODA”, a delightful tale about a teenage girl who is the only hearing member of her family, just made people feel more hopeful!
Weinstein himself described his tactics as a “guerilla campaign” and included, of course, him badmouthing “Saving Private Ryan” to journalists despite this kind of campaigning going against the spirit of the Oscars race (a celebration of film in case you’ve forgotten). This kind of negative campaign, while a big no-no, might be occurring more covertly now and is a mixture of stan culture meeting organised PR campaigns. There have been a number of controversies this Oscars campaign season, they’ve been written about in detail elsewhere (a great summary can be found at USA Today) but, in short, there are questions about whether rival camps have been ALLEGEDLY fanning the flames around some of the frontrunners of the year (“The Brutalist”, “Emilia Perez” and “Anora”).
Most importantly, Weinstein went to great lengths to ensure that people actually watched Miramax’s movies, something that Sean Fenessey and Amanda Dobbins of The Ringer’s “The Big Picture” podcast repeat almost religiously. The hosts speculate that “Sing Sing”, a talky movie based on true events about an acting programme in the Sing Sing Maximum Security Prison in New York, missed out on a Best Picture nomination because it suffered from a lack of availability despite it being the kind of movie Academy voters love. I should mention that Colman Domingo, who plays John "Divine G" Whitfield, a founder of the programme in the movie, did get a nomination for Best Actor.
Rules of The Campaign
(Fortuitously, the February 4th episode of The Rest is Entertainment was focused on just this subject)
For studios and talent alike, the goal of the campaign is to reach over 10,000 academy voters. The rub is, they’re not allowed to contact them directly (I assume this was a rule following Weinstein’s guerilla campaigning) so, what to do?
Phase 1 of winning an Oscar is actually being nominated for one. Nominations are selected by peers — actors vote for actors, directors vote for directors etc. This is when the above tactic of ensuring people actually see your movie comes in handy. Remember, there are thousands of movies, released in the U.S. and abroad, so make sure people know yours exists.
Spend money on hospitality. This includes lunches for Academy voters, wining and dining them, actors talking about the movies at Q&As and screenings etc.
Publish literature about your movie and how it was made e.g., mailing people coffee table books. Now, you can’t contact voters directly but nothing stops you from sending literature to awards journalists?? “The Favourite” had actors in powdered wigs personally deliver cakes to awards bloggers.
Create art exhibitions e.g. the costume exhibition for ”WICKED” at the V&A .
Incentivise studio employees by linking awards nominations to bonuses
Hire awards consultants - or buy an awards consulting firm - right from the development phase of the movie to help with things like which festival should the movie be in to give it the right start or give it a certain prestige? How can you use word of mouth and ensure the momentum feels organic?
Get your talent out there. There is an important role for the fashion industry in awards season campaigning: Loewe blew up during 2024's awards season. This is quite an intense part of the campaign - actors, directors, screenwriters, need to be everywhere. They need to do that Hollywood Reporter Roundtable, they need to sit down for the Variety’s Actors on Actors, attend all the major and smaller award ceremonies like the Gotham Independent Film Awards or the Film Independent Spirit Awards, and go to all the dinners and lunches thrown over this period. I was actually a little happy for Zendaya not being nominated for either “Dune” or “Challengers” because she’s currently filming Euphoria season 3 and I can’t imagine how she’d fit all this in? Some of the things that keep me up at night. There is a fine line though because while they expect you to sing for your supper, it can’t be too obvious, you can’t want it THAT badly because then it’s off putting (RIP Jennifer Lopez’ campaign for “Hustlers,” a DESERVED nomination).
As you can see, it takes a village to win an Oscar. Campaigning doesn’t negate these awards and make them meaningless; winning an Oscar is a Herculean feat that involves hundreds of people, similar to the making of the film itself. So, if the movie or actor you’re rooting for doesn’t win (or wasn’t nominated), just remember that awards don’t validate our enjoyment and love of something. But if it does, or they do, win, then naturally it means the Oscars are the beacon of taste and pinnacle of Film.
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