NOTES ON A SEASON

Ballots are in the mail, but is Oscar stuck in limbo?

Pete Hammond sizes up the prospects for the awards telecasts and for late entrants in the best picture race.

Pete Hammond

Notes on a Season

December 27, 2007

Awards ballots are in the mail to Oscar, Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild voters this week, but bigger questions remain in this baffling year.

Will anyone even be able to watch the Globe and Oscar results on television because of the writers strike?

While the question of the season looms over the town, it otherwise appears to be business as usual as the 5,829 voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences begin receiving their nomination ballots in the mail this week, due back on Jan. 12.

Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. members who vote on the Golden Globes also get their final ballots this week, with a return deadline of Jan. 9.

Meanwhile, the Screen Actors Guild mails its final ballots Friday, all due back on Jan. 25, just two days before their awards gala. That event looks like a definite go, thanks to the actors' cozy relationship with the Writers Guild of America, which has provided the group's annual ceremony a waiver.

NBC still insists the Golden Globes will air on the network Jan. 13 as scheduled. This despite the WGA's denial of a waiver and apparent intention to send its pickets to the Beverly Hilton that night, an action almost certain to result in no-shows from many, if not most, acting (and writing) nominees and presenters.

Since the Globes are all about Hollywood glamour, a gala that mixes movie superstars with big TV names and draws a huge viewing audience, will those viewers be content to watch if the stars boycott, making the biggest names on the red carpet Jeff Zucker and Les Moonves?

The spectacle of watching the writers picketing a show produced by other writers (the HFPA is comprised of nearly 90 Hollywood-based foreign journalists) is one of many ironies in this strike-challenged awards season.

Increasingly, many in the industry are questioning the wisdom and fairness of the WGA's waiver policy, which grants a free ride to SAG's show, the Independent Spirit Awards and others while pointedly denying the same thing to the Globes and, most likely, the Oscars.

All these events are meant to celebrate the artist, including writers, and in fact (more so than SAG and the Spirits) the Oscars are a product of the motion picture academy, which is partially made up of writers.

The leadership of the WGA is clearly counting on the actors to hold hands with them (in effect, a de facto actors strike when it comes to these particular award shows) and make a statement by aiming their torpedoes at the largest media targets they can find.

Since they haven't yet been successful in getting the producers to come back to the bargaining table, it appears they have adopted a policy to go after the biggest guns they can find -- the Globes and the Oscars -- in order to hurt the networks and studios both financially and in the court of public opinion.

The WGA, in reference to its policies regarding the Oscar and the Globe galas, says the appropriate time to "celebrate" will be when it gets a fair contract. But the guild still seems to have no problem letting the celebrations go on for SAG, the Spirits and of course, their own awards gala on Feb. 9.

Our guess is that when push comes to shove, the Globes go on as planned without an NBC telecast , something that lets the stars attend without crossing a picket line, but which would force the HFPA to give up $5 million in license fees and probably forgo its annual round of charitable contributions that comes from that total.

The first big awards telecast of the season -- the Broadcast Film Critics Assn.'s Critics Choice Awards, Jan. 7 on VH1 -- is unaffected by labor strife since the producing entities are not signatories to the WGA. Producers hope to have their biggest star turnout ever, not only due to the uncertainty of the Globes a week later but also because it's a good showcase, as academy voting is still going on then (nominations will be announced Jan. 22) and VH1 will be running the show at least four times during the week.

As for the Oscars, nothing has stopped that show from airing since its TV history began in 1953 -- although a strike in 1967 almost did the trick.

That year, the academy was planning to hold its show April 10 despite an ongoing strike by AFTRA, the union with jurisdiction over live TV broadcasts.

It appeared likely the Oscars would be seen only by those in attendance at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, which would have cost the academy a reported $700,000 (this year a TV blackout would set the organization back around $30 million).

Even though camera rehearsals proceeded in case of a settlement, the outlook was grim until a miraculous agreement was reached with the union just three hours before showtime.

The show was indeed seen on ABC, although, as it turned out, Walter Matthau was the only acting winner (best supporting actor for "The Fortune Cookie") on hand to accept in person.

Optimists want to believe the strike will not be going on two months from now, when the Oscars are scheduled to air (Feb. 24). But lately it's a lot easier to find pessimists when talking about this particular scenario. If it lasts as long as the 1988 writers walkout, the pickets will still be out there into mid-April.

Perhaps Directors Guild of America chief contract negotiator Gil Cates has a miracle up his sleeve when the directors start their talks sometime after the first of the year -- a miracle that not only will affect the outcome of the writers strike but also save this year's 80th Oscars show, which he is producing for the 14th time.

As for the other questions about the race for awards gold in the usually dormant week between Christmas and New Years: can box office and a campaign blitz make a difference for the late starters?

"Sweeney Todd" has pulled in a pretty good $14 million in its first five days but has been dropping slowly down the charts. An official academy screening last Saturday drew a fairly light (and older) crowd of around 400 and received mixed response, according to observers.

The toll of being screened on the weekend just before Christmas also hit "Charlie Wilson's War" and "The Great Debaters," which each had even more sparse turnouts at the academy headquarters. But those who showed seemed to like what they saw.

In the case of director and star Denzel Washington's "Debaters," which opened Christmas Day to around $3.4 million, it would appear to be an uphill climb trying to get traction in a race that so far seems mostly to be rewarding early starters.

But the film has turned into a major passion project for Oscar-warrior and recently married Harvey Weinstein, whose company is releasing the film through MGM. The newlywed is even interrupting his honeymoon period long enough to lead the awards charge.

Weinstein has been pushing his staff to pull out all the stops for the film with nightly screenings aimed at voters wherever they can find them, not only in such holiday haunts as Maui, Aspen, Sun Valley, Palm Springs and Santa Barbara, but also Greenwich, Conn., Westchester, N.Y., Detroit, Orlando and Chicago.

Before the film opened, Weinstein even made sure his staff rented out his "good luck" theater, the Malibu Twin, where the film has been drawing approving academy members like Shirley MacLaine.

The Golden Globe nomination "Debaters" grabbed earlier this month in the best picture drama category was a key part of the strategy. The film also has been announced as the winner of the Stanley Kramer Award from the Producers Guild, and now the DVD has been delivered to academy voters just as ballots go out.

In a rare move for Weinstein, the company is also promoting the film with a large outdoor advertising campaign, putting it in voters faces everywhere they drive.

The hope is that the film about an all-black Texas debate team that goes on to compete at Harvard in the mid-1930s will appeal to voters tired of some of the more violent, depressing contenders and generate positive word-of-mouth in academy circles to become a January surprise in the still-wide-open best picture race.

Certainly it has the stuff best picture Oscar contenders are made of -- at least if we are looking historically at the academy's tendency to nominate and even reward films with racial and social import.

Norman Jewison's "In the Heat of the Night" was a best picture winner exactly 40 years ago, and since then best picture nominations have gone to the likes of "Sounder," "A Soldier's Story," "The Color Purple" and "Ray," among other films with primarily African American casts.

Denzel Washington, who also has "American Gangster" competing against "Debaters" for the Golden Globe, has helped out doing, several screening Q&As, and has been vocal in saying that "Debaters" is the movie where his heart is.

Can "Debaters" make an end run with the clock ticking in the fourth quarter?

There's at least one newlywed out there who thinks so.

"Sometimes you don't get to come in with a lot of hoopla," Weinstein says. "Sometimes it's just about the tortoise winning the race in the end."

Don't you just love The Season?