The year is 2006. Competing for Best Picture, the top prize of the 78th Academy Awards, are five films. Ang Lee’s wrenchingly sad queer cowboy love story Brokeback Mountain, starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger is a critical favourite.
Capote, a meaty biopic by Bennett Miller, stars the incomparable Philip Seymour Hoffman in the title role. George Clooney’s gripping Good Night, and Good Luck celebrates CBS news reporter Edward R Murrow and an era of journalistic idealism and daring. Munich, directed by Steven Spielberg, is a propulsive historical thriller about the aftermath of the Black Friday terror attack during the Munich Olympics.
But the film that wins is Paul Haggis’s Crash, a thuddingly unsubtle attempt to engage with US racial politics through a laboured, multi-stranded storyline. Initial reviews have been relatively positive: Rolling Stone describes it as “a knockout”; The Washington Post lauds a “rare American film really about something”.
But after the Oscars win, perception of the film starts to shift; it is positioned somewhere between a punching bag and a punchline for an ongoing joke about the Academy’s voting habits. Crash earns a degree of notoriety that it would probably never have achieved had it not won.
In 2023, it’s probably not a question that is foremost in the minds of the film industry elite preparing themselves for this weekend’s ceremony. But is it sometimes better not to win an Oscar?
Trawl through Oscar history and mythology, and it doesn’t take long to find a base layer of superstition, and the idea of an “Oscar curse”. This, proponents argue, strikes occasionally and randomly, and manifests in a career which, instead of receiving a boost from a win, founders or loses direction. Examples cited include Louise Fletcher, whose win for her chilling performance as Nurse Ratched failed to translate into a high-profile film career, and F Murray Abraham, a winner for Amadeus, who languished for over a decade in supporting roles in a string of B movies.
While it is pretty much impossible to establish a causative relationship between an Oscar win and a subsequent career spiral, it does seem possible that the spotlight falling on Tatum O’Neal, for example – at 10, the youngest actor to win an Academy Award – might have contributed to her later problems.
Charles Gant, awards editor of Screen International, takes a more pragmatic view of the potential negative consequences of a win. “What can happen is that voters reward someone who is very well cast in a particular role. But then Hollywood struggles to find the right role for them. It could lead to false expectations, to the actor turning down roles that they perhaps should have accepted or to their agent demanding fees untethered to the commercial realities of the marketplace.” All of which could skew a career trajectory after a win, but which hardly amounts to a curse. But that’s not to say that there aren’t dark forces at work. Each award contender comes with a distinct narrative that builds throughout the campaign season. Some of this grows organically (seemingly at least) but much of it is curated by awards strategists.
This is precision engineering of the wider perception of a film or talent, but ultimately the aim is simple: to persuade the voters that some contenders are more deserving than others.
It’s a gruelling process, argues Joe Utichi, awards editor of Deadline, which can be scarring for those sucked into the awards machine. “I’d draw a distinction between winning the Oscar itself and the increasingly protracted period of Oscar campaigning – which now runs for more than half of any given year – and the slings and arrows thrown by the ‘awards conversation’. I’m not sure the Oscar itself can have as much of a negative impact as the scrutiny contenders are placed under in the run-up to the awards.
“Strategists whose job it is to secure awards success – and you’ll find that many of today’s biggest players cut their teeth during the Harvey Weinstein/Miramax era of awards, often at his employ – have become increasingly relentless at picking holes in their competition. An award contender’s every move – during the campaign and before it – is examined with a level of scrutiny that even political campaigners might feel goes too far. And there are few checks and balances in place to ensure these campaign tactics are scrutinised as keenly as the contenders themselves. The human cost of existing under that microscopeis rarely acknowledged. But it can be absolutely devastating for the individuals facing it.”
The vilification of unpopular contenders – and winners – is nothing new. The 1941 film How Green Was My Valley, which defeated Citizen Kane to win Best Picture, was booed during the ceremony. But the backlash against certain winners has been magnified by social media. Clips of particularly clunky moments from Bohemian Rhapsody circulated widely on the internet following the 2019 Academy Awards, intended to call into question the film’s win for Best Editing.
Social media can also be harnessed in a film or an actor’s favour. A flood of clips showcasing Barry Keoghan’s performance in The Banshees of Inisherin might not have ensured his nomination but certainly didn’t hurt. And a targeted campaign by fellow actors, including Kate Winslet, Edward Norton and Charlize Theron, supporting Andrea Riseborough’s remarkable performance in the low-budget indie film To Leslie, led to her unexpected nomination for Best Actress this year. This caused ripples in certain sectors of the awards industry, an industry widely invested in the continuation of the more traditional – expensive – campaign approach.
The backlash to her nomination was swift and emphatic. The campaign was accused of breaking rules (an Academy investigation found that it had not) and Riseborough was, unfairly, deemed to have taken a slot earmarked by pundits for either Viola Davis or Danielle Deadwyler. A win for Riseborough at this point could be a double-edged sword, reigniting the controversy and distracting, once again, from the quality of her performance.
Ultimately, however, the consensus is that even an unpopular win is still an Oscar win, and the politics are largely unimportant to the punters outside of what Gant describes as the “media-bubble perspective. Do the producers of Crash regret being the poster children for undeserving Best Picture winners? I am guessing not.”
