The uniform might be cocktail wear, and the battlefields screening rooms, chat shows and brunches, but a “campaign” – with its echoes of elections and wars – is the correct word for what actors and other filmmakers wage during awards season.
It’s a bi-coastal, highly co-ordinated assault on the media, critics and one's peers. Campaign 2010/11 kicked into high gear at the Gotham Independent Film Awards on Nov. 29, and for a lucky few, won’t let up until the Academy Awards on Feb. 27. That’s almost three full months of strapping on stilettos, smiling for the crowds, and shilling one's film.
“And there’s no point being coy about it,” the actress Patricia Clarkson said during a visit to Toronto. “Everybody cares [about awards]. I know an actress who moved to L.A. for six months, just to campaign. There’s not one person out there who doesn’t care.” For many good reasons.
Clarkson was braving the front lines to whip up interest in the DVD release of – and long-shot awards buzz for – Cairo Time, the Canadian love story that premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2009 but didn’t hit Los Angeles and New York until summer 2010. As a best-supporting-actress Oscar nominee in 2003 for Pieces of April, she learned first-hand the benefits of a concerted campaign.
“It’s useful,” she said. “Especially for a small movie. Just to remind people. You can’t make them vote for you; the important thing is for people to know you’re in the race. You want them to see your performance. You want them to go to the screening, or put the disc in.”
“No one wants to be forgotten,” agreed Sofia Coppola, the writer-director of the new film Somewhere, from Los Angeles. She, too, has battled before, with her 2003 film Lost in Translation. (She was the first American woman nominated for a best-director Oscar, and won for best original screenplay.)
“There are so many movies that come out this time of year,” she said. “So yeah, there’s stuff that they [studios and distributors] want you to go to more. I’m talking to as many people as possible, so hopefully ours won’t get lost in the shuffle.”
The director John Cameron Mitchell (Hedwig and the Angry Inch) is campaigning for his drama Rabbit Hole, starring Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart as parents coping with the death of their four-year-old son. The film has already netted a best-actress nod from the Screen Actors Guild for Kidman, along with Spirit Awards nominations for directing, screenplay and both lead actors.
“I’m old enough to not be so carried away as someone in this situation at 21,” Mitchell told me. “For Hedwig, we had a kind of campaign, and I got nominated for a Golden Globe, which is lovely. But I’m such a weird outsider. I feel like a foreign-exchange student in Hollywood. If good news comes my way, great, but I’m too sensitive. I remember thinking, ‘Why aren’t we nominated when that film is no good?’ The whole thing can be disruptive and cannibalistic.”
Not to mention exhausting. Contenders are instructed to blog and tweet and to sit down for interviews with as many print, radio and TV outlets as possible. (Larry King’s show used to be a favourite stop, so Piers Morgan could begin his new gig with a bang.)
Players are also encouraged to glam up and hit the town, including movie premieres (yours and anyone else’s where you might want to be seen), Q&A sessions (which are audience pleasing but expensive), and buzz-generating luncheons, dinners or events – such as the party Ingrid Sischy and Miuccia Prada co-hosted last month for Javier Bardem’s film Biutiful. “It’s a lot of work, because you have to be everywhere,” Clarkson said.
