Outside, it's still watermelon-and-feta-salad weather. Inside, though, at least in the corridors of movie studios and showbiz fixers, minds are already squared on Feb. 28, 2016. Destination: Oscar.
With the industry already in battle-mode for the major fall film fest rigamarole (i.e. Venice, Telluride, Toronto and New York), the analogy writes itself: The awards season is not unlike an election (albeit one with an electorate of just 6,000 people or so). It has morphed into a year-long phenom, with bloggers galore to track every tweet and twitch. Oscarologist Mark Harris framed it this way once in New York magazine: "There is no war room, per se, but there are early front-runners that fade, grassroots insurgencies, even primaries. Ultimately, most of the nominees emerge from a combination of good planning, good movies, and good luck."
It's a contest that's reaped its share of groans over the years, but one that earned its sharpest ire yet from an insider when actor Edward Norton got on his soapbox in a recent interview. "Once a film gets channelled by the industry into that death grip of marketing via the springboard of the awards season, it's this repetitive grind," he told Indiewire last week. "Who wants to spend that much time talking about anything?"
"I think the awards season has become this thing that has metastasized," Norton went on. "Every single thing that transpires between November and February is awards created by bodies of critics, whether it's the Hollywood Foreign Press with the Golden Globes, the National Board of Review, the New York Film Critics Circle or the L.A. one, Critics' Choice. It goes on and on."
Rant-wise, it was exquisite stuff. Many pom-pom'ed. Others questioned Norton's perch of entitlement. Tell that to those who don't already have an anchor in Hollywood or whose clout has zig-zagged. Tell it to the makers of Beasts of the Southern Wild, a little-movie-that-could-have-gone-Cinderella when it was piggybacked by Oscar a couple years back. Tell it to Boyhood's Patricia Arquette, who had ammo when she was younger, but was ignored when she wandered into middle-age. "Winning an Oscar for her meant something," Sasha Stone of AwardsDaily.com wrote. "It was validation." Putting aside the matter of beauty/eyes/beholder, and the unseemliness of some of the money and hoopla around awards season, there is a method to the marathon madness.
And lest anyone think all this politicking is new … it isn't. History's first Oscar campaign is attributed to Mary Pickford, who was called "America's Sweetheart," but was actually Canadian – a time-honoured tradition. Keen to nab a golden statuette in 1929, the Toronto-sprung Pickford practised the powers of persuasion by having the then-five-member Academy voting committee over for tea to discuss her craft. (She won.)
If Earl Grey doesn't work, nearly expiring just might do the trick. It certainly did for Elizabeth Taylor in 1961, when she grabbed a statuette for her call-girl turn in the turgid potboiler Butterfield 8. With the headlines blaring that the star of stars was at death's door due to a bout of pneumonia and the night of the ceremony being her first appearance in eons, she attributed the win to public sympathy, claiming decades later, "I only won it because I almost died."
"I know no tricks, I know no black magic." That's at least what Lisa Taback claims when asked about her tactics. A member of that shadowy society of Oscar strategists, or what they in the biz call "publicity special operations" – she delivered Best Picture Oscars to two clients in the past decade – she insists, "There are no tricks. It's all about the movies. But if you're not committed and competitive and thinking in a clever way, you're not going to succeed."
And so we roll the Oscars narratives – ready to get under way at the Toronto International Film Festival soon, in much the same way any political campaign begins and ends with a "narrative." Can the Bryan Cranston-starring Trumbo, about the anti-communist McCarthy era, sidle into the awards race? It is, after all, a movie about Hollywood's favourite subject: itself. (See Birdman, The Artist, Argo, etc.)
Can indie darling Brie Larson pole-vault her way into the big leagues, care of her role in Room? There is always one nomination with the subtext, "Welcome to the club." Meanwhile, can Eddie Redmayne manage to pull off a repeat? After all, he's returning to the fest at which, just last year, his awards hopes were sparked with The Theory of Everything, and where, this year, similar Oscar astrophysics are hoped for with The Danish Girl – a biopic about Lili Elbe, one of the first known recipients of sexual reassignment surgery. In terms of a movie that speaks to a "moment" – a fail-proof Oscar narrative – Redmayne is already making the right noises.
Meanwhile, the spin coming from 350 King St. W., here at the TIFF headquarters, is simply: "Who, us?"
"Our dirty little secret is we've never really programmed with award season in mind," is what TIFF's artistic director Cameron Bailey told The Los Angeles Times recently. "It's like a beautiful warm wave when it happens, and it's fun sometimes to play that game about what's been nominated and not nominated, but we really are just looking for the best films that are generally available."
A little "self-justifying" coming from a fest that just missed its wagon-hitch to Oscar for the first time in eight years when Birdman winged it to Best Picture without first playing Toronto, no?
Blissfully ignorant or not, the stampede of Oscar sleuths cannot be stopped. Schmoozing. Gleaning info. Passing on intelligence and cannily planting stories. Watch for it, and more, when the back-to-school action is on in a few weeks. There's no business like it.