The $11 Billion Year

by Anne Thompson

  Academy voters historically approve of drastic weight gain or loss (see: Raging Bull) and degree of difficulty (singing live in one take with a camera staring down your gullet). But even so, toward the end of an endless awards campaign, folks are getting tired of hearing about Hathaway’s obsessive twenty-five-pound weight loss—she lived on two oatmeal pellets a day—and her Fantine-playing stage mother. Near the end of the Oscar voting, she is named the celebrity people most love to hate.

  And yet she survives that, as well as a hilarious “I Dreamed a Dream” parody video takedown by actress Emma Fitzpatrick (The Collection): “I sang a song about my woes / My hopes and fears, my dreams and wishes / And though I had to blow my nose / I did it all in one take, bitches.”

  May 27:

  AMOUR GRABS THE CANNES PALME D’OR

  At the Cannes closing awards ceremony, writer-director Michael Haneke brought his two stars, Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva, up to the stage to accept the Palme d’Or for Amour. From there, Sony Pictures Classics expertly shepherded the film through the fall film festivals ahead of its stateside opening at the height of award season on December 19.

  The film steadily built a string of foreign language film wins at the New York Film Critics Circle, National Board of Review, Critics’ Choice, Golden Globes, and BAFTAs, which also honored Riva with Best Actress, as did the Los Angeles Film Critics, the National Society of Film Critics, and the European Film Awards. The L.A. critics went so far as to award the film Best Picture.

  On Oscar nominations morning, Amour scores an astonishing five nods, landing on the Best Picture list of nine and earning surprise writing and directing nominations for Haneke. The Foreign Language nomination is expected, but Amour marks the first time since The Emigrants in 1973 that a foreign Best Picture nominee also lands a Best Actress nomination. Films that have nabbed both Best Actress and Foreign Language nominations belong to an elite club indeed: Life Is Beautiful, Z, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

  Sony Pictures Classics, which always releases more than a few foreign films in Oscar contention, faces the not unwelcome potential challenge of dueling Best Actress nominees, both glories of the French cinema: previous Oscar winner Marion Cotillard, for her mesmerizing turn as a gravely injured woman who finds love, self-respect, and a second career as a rough and tumble boxing manager in Jacques Audiard’s Rust and Bone, and the unforgettable Riva. Trintignant, who still has a sexy glint in his eye as he flirts with Riva, is equally deserving of a statuette. Neither he nor Cotillard score nominations.

  But eighty-five-year-old Riva, who starred in Hiroshima Mon Amour, a movie that many Academy seniors remember, reaches into voters’ hearts and becomes the oldest Best Actress nominee to walk the red carpet—on her eighty-sixth birthday. As it turns out, Riva has the best shot at unseating Lawrence. Even though it’s a tough, wrenching look at the end of life, Amour plays well with many older Academy members. “It’s my life,” director Paul Mazursky, eighty-two, tells me.

  But Riva has limited stamina for awards campaigning. So Sony puts her on the phone with press. They send Haneke to the L.A. Film Critics awards and Golden Globes, and put Riva in the limelight at the New York Film Critics Circle and National Board of Review awards. It’s her first trip to America. She asks Barker for a car so that she can drive to lower Manhattan and see the Statue of Liberty. The day after accepting the César for Best Actress in Paris, Riva takes the grueling long flight to L.A. for the Oscars.

  DECEMBER 19:

  ON THE OPENING DAY OF ZERO DARK THIRTY, THREE U.S. SENATORS ACCUSE THE FILMMAKERS OF INACCURACY

  Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty takes off like a shot with film critics, winning New York Film Critics Circle awards for Best Film and Director on December 3, followed by National Board of Review awards for Best Film, Director, and Actress (Jessica Chastain) on December 5. And Bigelow is runner-up for Best Director at the Los Angeles Film Critics Association vote on December 9.

  The filmmakers studiously avoid politics by not revealing the movie’s content until after the November presidential election, but that strategy goes out the window when the movie opens. On that very day, December 19, 2012, after having viewed the film, Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Dianne Feinstein, Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Carl Levin, and Senate Armed Services Committee ranking member John McCain send a scathing letter of complaint to Sony Pictures Entertainment chairman and CEO Michael Lynton about the reported but fictionalized film account of the CIA’s ten-year hunt for Osama bin Laden.

  The senators describe the movie as “grossly inaccurate and misleading,” and focus their ire on footage depicting CIA officers torturing prisoners that “credits these detainees with providing critical lead information” on the courier who eventually led the CIA to the bin Laden compound in Pakistan: “Zero Dark Thirty is factually inaccurate, and we believe that you have an obligation to state that the role of torture in the hunt for Osama Bin Laden is not based on the facts, but rather part of the film’s fictional narrative.”

  While the resulting controversy and debate drives moviegoers to the box office and fuels the $45 million film’s strong stateside numbers (it totals $95.7 million domestic, $42 million foreign), the awards campaign never recovers. At the BAFTA tea party on Golden Globes weekend, I ask Bigelow if the studio presented Zero Dark Thirty as too much true story and too little fiction. She looks me in the eye and says, “I would not change a thing.”

  Though the movie gets five Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, Bigelow is not nominated for Best Director. Producer-writer Mark Boal lands a nomination for Original Screenplay, and rising star Jessica Chastain for Best Actress in a Leading Role. (The other two nominations are for film and sound editing.) Chastain remains a strong contender in her category, but perhaps because she identifies with her role as CIA agent Maya, the smartest person in the room, her interviews and acceptance speech at the Critics’ Choice Awards—her first Best Actress win on the road to the Oscars—take on a feminist slant. She says, “It was a great honor to play a woman defined by herself and not her male counterpart.”

  Chastain is expected to go on to win the dramatic actress prize at the Golden Globes, and does, saying, “Bigelow has done more for women and cinema than she takes credit for.” But it is impossible not to notice some of the male blowback online. No one looked snazzier on the red carpet, but Chastain’s Jessica Rabbit curves belie her assertive intelligence.

  At the Academy luncheon on February 4, Bigelow exudes nothing but confidence, enjoying her biggest box-office hit to date and being the subject of a Time magazine cover story. “It was sort of surreal,” she admits, “but it was great.”

  At the Directors Guild Awards some weeks later, nominee and presenter Bigelow, who accepted the DGA award for The Hurt Locker two years before, thanks Sony’s Amy Pascal, saying, “To support a movie that has a few sharp edges is no small feat.”

  However, while critics recognize and admire the advances Bigelow has made by breaking Hollywood narrative genre and gender conventions, the Academy is largely made up of older white males. (That 2013 Los Angeles Times study showed that Oscar voters are nearly 94 percent Caucasian and 77 percent male.) Perceived as an early leader, Zero Dark Thirty swiftly became the focus of a fierce negative campaign. But its lack of support came from within the Academy.

  The Academy knows it needs to deal with the lack of diversity in it ranks. Ever since Dawn Hudson came on board as CEO in 2011, the Academy has made a point of inviting more young members and people of color, including, in 2012, Berenice Bejo, Jonah Hill, Diego Luna, Demián Bichir, and Octavia Spencer. In 2013, the Academy sent membership invites to a whopping 276 people, 100 more than the year before, many of them young, gifted, female, or ethnic, including actors Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Michael Peña; actresses Kimberly Elise, Milla Jovovich, Lucy Liu, Jennifer Lopez, and Emmanuelle Riva; writer-director Ava DuVernay; writers Lena Dunham, Sarah Polley, and Julie Delpy (whose Oscar-nominated Before
Sunset cowriters Richard Linklater and Ethan Hawke had been invited years before); octogenarian documentarian Agnès Varda; Brit director Steve McQueen; Warner Bros. executive Kevin Tsujihara; and the rock star/composer known as Prince.

  January 10, 2013:

  IN A STUNNER, THE OSCAR DIRECTORS FAIL TO NOMINATE BEN AFFLECK

  Only members of the Academy directors’ branch are eligible to nominate in the Best Director category. Three of the five slots go to Spielberg (Lincoln), Ang Lee (Life of Pi), and David O. Russell (Silver Linings Playbook). When Michael Haneke (Amour) and Behn Zeitlin (Beasts of the Southern Wild) unpredictably snag the other two slots, this throws the Oscar race into a tailspin. Many observers (this one included) expected the directors to nominate Bigelow (whose film Zero Dark Thirty nabs five nominations), Ben Affleck (Argo, seven), Tom Hooper (Les Misérables, eight), or Quentin Tarantino (Django Unchained, five), all of whom have films among the top nine Best Picture nominees. The directors branch is known for making idiosyncratic choices, but rarely have the DGA (which the next week nominates Spielberg, Lee, Bigelow, Affleck, and Hooper) and Academy lists been so different.

  The stats are unforgiving. It’s so rare for a film to win Best Picture without a director nomination or DGA win that Spielberg, who directed Lincoln, which led the pack with a total twelve nominations, and Lee, whose Life of Pi scored eleven, are instantly placed in the lead to win Best Director and Picture, followed by writer-director Russell, whose Silver Linings Playbook scores eight nods. The last movie to make it to Best Picture without a director nomination was Driving Miss Daisy, which won the Oscar without a nomination for Bruce Beresford back in 1990; you have to go back to 1929 silent classic Wings and 1932 Grand Hotel for the only two other examples.

  Clearly, the brainy Academy directors’ branch chose to support two perceived underdogs. Perhaps a young indie and a senior Austrian made less threatening competitors. The Academy directors, who count quite a few foreign filmmakers among their 371 members, make up just 6 percent of the Academy’s entire membership. Their choices hardly represent the entire voting group; they always throw a few surprises into the mix, from Brit Mike Leigh to Spain’s Pedro Almodóvar. But post-nominations, the conventional wisdom was to question whether Argo, Zero Dark Thirty, Django Unchained, or Les Misérables had even a prayer of beating Lincoln over the next voting phase . . . and beyond.

  Within twelve hours of the Oscar nominations, major players assemble at the first broadcast awards ceremony of the year, the annual Critics’ Choice Awards. Voted on by some 250 broadcast and online members of the Broadcast Film Critics Association (including me), many Critics’ Choice winners match up with the Oscars. This year the show is being broadcast live on the CW, three days ahead of the Golden Globes, from a chilly hangar at the Santa Monica Airport. The morning’s nominations are the hot topic as studio execs, publicists, agents, and talent sip fizzy champagne at crowded round dinner tables and debate the reasons why directors Bigelow, Affleck, Hooper, and Tarantino were robbed by the Academy directors’ branch, as well as why little-indies-that-could Beasts of the Southern Wild and Amour did so surprisingly well.

  One problem for Django Unchained is that it came out of the gate so late, and the Weinstein Company didn’t send screeners to the voters until the week before the nomination ballots were due. (Harvey Weinstein later takes the rap for Tarantino not doing better on nominations morning. The mogul admits to Deadline’s Mike Fleming that he felt so strongly that Academy members should see the film on screen that he refused to send them DVDs until the last minute.) As for Bigelow, everyone agrees that she suffered from the controversy about torture. And the consensus on Hooper is that while the past winner is respected for his directing chops, he may have pushed too far with the live-action singing and alienated many of his peers.

  But clearly the most shocking omission is Affleck, who was considered a shoo-in. Theories abound as to why he was overlooked. I never buy forty-year-old Affleck’s own notion that his director colleagues consider him to be too young and callow. Historically, when actors are nominated for Best Director they become the instant favorite because they are in effect winning a popularity contest. In the past, actor-directors George Clooney, Kevin Costner, Robert Redford, Kenneth Branagh, Mel Gibson, and Warren Beatty were all rewarded with directing nominations—back when there were just five Best Picture contenders. The math of nine slots vs. five directors is unforgiving. Someone is going to be left out. But the truth is if Affleck had been nominated, he would have been the clear favorite among the Academy at large.

  So it’s a huge surprise when Argo wins the Critics’ Choice Awards for both Best Director and Best Film. Producers Clooney and Grant Heslov stand onstage with the Oscar-snubbed Affleck, who quips, “I want to thank the Academy . . .”

  The next day at the classy and intimate American Film Institute’s Best of 2012 lunch at the Four Seasons, studio heads and many of the same players continue the conversation. Affleck and Bigelow commiserate in one corner of the crowded white room jammed with round lunch tables, as grinning nominee Zeitlin talks to two other directors left out of the running, Hooper and Chris Nolan. One veteran Lincoln Oscar campaigner suggests that Affleck has been too available to the press, even overexposed. True, Affleck was front and center as director and star while promoting his film. And, he tells me, he plans to continue to work for the film.

  Thus, while they were once considered solid contenders, Affleck and Argo are now shunted to the back of the pack by Hollywood and the Oscar pundits. Crucially, Affleck pays no attention to the stats. He knows the movie plays well for his friends, fans, and followers. He actually earns sympathy for being passed over. And the actor, who is nothing if not charming, earns more good will as a horse coming up on the outside than he would as a front-runner. The outside, in this case, is actually a preferable place to be. The loss drives him to work his wiles on every potential voter he can, armed with sage advice from producer Clooney on how to be appropriately deferential but confident, eager but not hungry, adorable but not cloying. It’s the Oscar tap dance.

  Finally, Argo has more going for it than Affleck. It’s the populist crowd pleaser of the bunch, the consensus movie everyone likes, the smart but unpretentious and entertaining thrill-ride that keeps audiences on the edge of their seats and allows Hollywood to cheer for itself.

  January 10:

  SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK WALKS INTO HISTORY WITH FOUR ACTING NODS

  On Oscar nominations morning, for the first time in thirty-one years (since Warren Beatty’s epic Reds), Silver Linings Playbook scores in all four acting categories, putting the comedy drama in a league with Oscar winners Sunset Boulevard and Streetcar Named Desire. First-time nominee Bradley Cooper, second-timers Lawrence and Australian actress Jacki Weaver (Animal Kingdom), and Oscar winner Robert De Niro (Raging Bull), who has not been included in an Oscar race since 1991’s Cape Fear, all score nominations. It’s a sign of considerable strength, even for a modest indie talkie lacking the visual bells and whistles of larger-scale contenders.

  The fact that Russell scores Writer and Director nominations and that the film is a Best Picture candidate is all to the good, but the four acting slots gives the film a strong push because the actors’ branch is by far the biggest in the Academy, some twelve hundred strong. The next biggest branches (in the four hundreds) are executives, producers, and publicists.

  Though Jessica Chastain won Best Actress at the National Board of Review, four days later Lawrence took the far more prestigious Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award—sharing the prize with Amour star Riva.

  Oddly, at the Critics’ Choice Awards, Silver Linings star Lawrence is competing in three categories, not only Best Actress, but also Actress in a Comedy and Actress in an Action Film. She charmingly accepts awards in the latter two categories for Silver Linings and Hunger Games, respectively. “I love critics,” she says, grinning at the room. “I am the happiest I’ve ever been in my life.”

  That night, Sil
ver Linings Playbook gets another boost for its Oscar campaign by winning Best Acting Ensemble and Best Actor in a Comedy for Cooper, who thanks David O. Russell for “a real script. He got all of us to be real.” The film also wins Best Comedy; Russell clarifies: “It’s a comedy and a drama,” and thanks his son, who inspired him in making the film.

  Weinstein hired a consultant specifically to target the film’s mental health issues with the press. At the Academy luncheon nine days later, Russell stays on Weinstein campaign message to position entertaining romantic comedy Silver Linings as a more serious movie. Comedies don’t do well at the Oscars, so the stress is on serious topic mental illness. Russell and his cast are all on point as they make their last-ditch press rounds to Katie Couric (where De Niro cries) and more. “We stigmatize mental illness,” Russell tells me earnestly at the lunch. “Having that posture toward it is wrong. Why treat it like that?”

  Lawrence works the TV press circuit poolside at the Beverly Hilton after the lunch, along with her costar Jacki Weaver and Flight star Denzel Washington. Meanwhile, De Niro submits to the hands-and-feet ceremony in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard and attends an Aero Theatre tribute and Q&A in Santa Monica for West Siders. De Niro looks to have a good shot at a Supporting Actor award in a wide-open field led by Lincoln SAG-winner Tommy Lee Jones. But with five strong Oscar winners in Supporting, anything can happen.

  The Weinstein Company plays out a risky distribution and marketing plan as the movie’s wide release keeps being pushed back. When a movie is platformed in select cities and theaters and slowly broadens, the question is when to go wide. Silver Linings builds strong word-of-mouth with audiences, but the company is trying to maximize its expenditures while taking full advantage of all the awards buzz for a movie that lacks strong audience awareness going in, says Weinstein Company COO David Glasser, who supervises distribution and marketing. In the end, TWC waits until the week before the nominations to go wide.