It's June and another big week in a run up to the midterms, primaries and half a dozen states, including California, where new congressional maps are in place and a chaotic race for governor is wide open. We're also following gas prices and Iran. So far, our talk of a peace deal is just talk. We'll keep you posted.
Listen every morning, up first on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Planet Money from NPR. When I reached journalist Matt Bellany last week, it was in the final 24 hours of an intensely thought campaign season. Different factions, led by specialized campaign strategists, had just spent the better part of eight months pushing their candidates through a grueling gauntlet of stump speeches, fancy gals, voter outreach events, many of which Matt had himself attended.
Do you ever think of yourself as a kind of campaign reporter? Oh, all the time. I am a campaign reporter for the entertainment industry. Matt used to be the editor of the Hollywood Reporter these days he hosted a podcast called The Town.
And yes, the campaigns that we're talking about today, these are the glitzy glossy campaigns put on by Hollywood movie studios every year in hopes of winning big at the Academy Awards. And these campaigns come to a head in the weeks leading up to the ceremony. That's where you start to see people doing desperate things like taking off other clothes and floating in a freezing river like Bradley Cooper did for the New York Times magazine. Or you see Ryan Gosling climbing the Warner Brothers water tower to take a photo for a trade magazine.
Or you see the border collie from the movie Anatomy of a Fall get treated like a celebrity and carted around town and brought to charm voters. That is a campaign strategy. Matt says that this time of year, the signs of this massive campaign machinery are all around us. Like maybe you saw Best Actress nominee Emma Stone hosting SNL.
Or maybe you heard her wherever you get your podcasts. Emma Stone welcome to Fresh Air. I love this movie and your performance in it. Maybe you caught Best Actor nominee Killian Murphy of Oppenheimer, profiled on CBS's 60 Minutes, seven months after the movie came out, but perfectly timed to the start of Academy voting.
2023 was the year the world learned to pronounce Killian, the ancient Irish name. Or you may have noticed the mysterious words for your consideration, slashed across movie ads in your local newspaper or on billboards all across Los Angeles. And maybe wondered is it my consideration they're asking for? No, although it's a nice byproduct I guess.
The consideration they are asking for is awards voters to consider this movie for awards voting. For long time, I think I had this kind of naive understanding of awards shows like The Oscars. Like sure, they are maybe a nauseatingly self-aggrandizing celebration of Hollywood. But at their core, I think I assumed that they were basically meritocratic.
Matt Bellany says no. When you watch The Oscars, you are watching the end result of an eight to 10 month strategic and very expensive political campaign. Plain and simple. Hello and welcome to my I'm Alexi Horwitz-Gazi.
Once upon a time, getting a big Oscar nomination or a win could dependably be turned into box office gold. But over the past couple decades, the economics of movie making have changed that calculus. Today on the show, we peek into The Oscars campaign playable. Figure out why Hollywood juggernauts are still spending tens of millions of dollars trying to win Academy Awards.
As we mentioned, Amazon, Apple, Disney, Beyond Films, Netflix, and Universal Pictures, all companies that sponsor NPR or pay to distribute NPR content. So this can be a notoriously secretive part of the entertainment industry. Give us a sense of how you've come to know what you know when it comes to these Oscars campaigns. Well, I have been a journalist covering this industry for more than 15 years.
Before that, I was an entertainment lawyer and in the business and seeing it. But it is an ecosystem unto itself. Matt Bellany has spent the past two decades translating the inner workings of Hollywood for outsiders and insiders alike. And he says the key thing to understand about The Oscars race is that it boils down to convincing individual people to support your film.
All you're trying to do is get as many votes as you can, solidify your coalition, and hopefully get a victory. Yeah. And who exactly is the electorate here? The electorate ultimately is the 10,000 or so members of the Motion Picture Academy.
These voters are people who've worked in the film industry and who've been invited by its board to join the Academy. Matt says that the first phase of The Oscars race, Phase 1, is all about getting those voters to nominate your film. That means targeting specific groups of voters, because the Academy's 10,000 or so members are divided into branches. Each branch nominates the nominees in their branch.
So editors vote for editors, directors vote for directors, actors vote for actors, except Best Picture. Best Picture is voted on by everybody. So if you are running a campaign, the strategy for Phase 1 is to pick the battles you think you might be able to win. Is your client sitting on a potential Best Director award?
You're gonna have to figure out how and where to reach every eligible director in the Academy to make sure that they have seen your movie. You'll send them screener links, invite them to star-studded, well-catered in-person screenings. Then the nominations come out and we enter Phase 2, where the table has been set and now you are trying to get people to vote for your candidate to win. In Phase 2, Matt explains, every Academy voter is fair game, because every voter is now eligible to vote in every category.
And Phase 2 is all about framing the film with a message, something that'll make it feel bigger than just a piece of entertainment. Like you can feel good voting for this movie because it means something. That's the job of the awards campaigner, to take a movie and make it important. So take this year's front-runner Oppenheimer.
Matt says that film has been sold as... The big important Hollywood studio movie that, for the good of the business and the good of the industry, you should vote for this for Best Picture. They used a quote from a review that said, this is the best movie of the century or something like that. We're only a quarter in.
Well, you know, it's an ad. Compare that to the messaging for the movie, Poor Things, whose four-year consideration ads implore voters to quote, defy expectations. Kind of an underdog message. Now, once you have your message, Matt says, the campaigns are then really about using every ounce of star power and publicity at your disposal to charm Academy voters.
This is why Oscar thirsty celebrities do splashing magazine covers, or well-timed radio interviews, or why they appear at special screenings, or talk at Q&As where voters might be in attendance. And every chance encounter between the talent and the voters can be incredibly important. Because sometimes the way people vote can have a little to do with the actual film they're being asked to consider. For example, the Hollywood Reporter does anonymous polling with individual Academy voters every year.
Which reveals that people vote for the strangest reasons. This guy that the Hollywood Reporter just did a ballot with. He says that he voted for Robert Downey Jr. I'm not kidding, because Downey was nice to him at a party.
Now, if all of this seems like a giant hype machine of recirculating hot air, that is very much by design. The Academy Awards were initially conceived in the 1920s, in part as a way of flattering and distracting actors who were flirting with unionization, but also as a way to promote the industry to the wider world. For most of the 20th century, it was standard for Hollywood studios to promote their films and stars for awards, but the amount of money and strategy directed solely with the aim of winning Oscars was comparatively low. So to understand how Oscar's campaigns transformed into the super expensive, highly competitive circus we see today, I want to visit someone who's worked on these campaigns for decades.
Have you been working on any campaigns we might have heard of? Oppenheimer. Oh yeah, I've heard of that. Tony Angelotti got his start in the 1980s, and since then he set a kind of front row seat to the transformation of Oscar's campaigns.
I met him at his office in LA where the walls are covered with framed signed posters from his different movie campaigns. Well, in this room, let's see, we're looking at various campaigns that were either winners or nominated for Best Picture or one of the number of things Life is Beautiful, Pulp Fiction, Frostnixen, Finding Nemo, Ray, these are all movies I worked on. Tony says when he first started, the big studios had viewed Oscar's campaigns as a way to keep the talent happy. It was just a cost of doing business.
And if you did end up winning or getting nominated for a major category, you could count on what insiders call the Oscar bump. One study found if you won Best Picture in those days, it could be an up to a $12 million bump at the box office. But when Tony arrived at a company called Miramax in the early 1990s, it was already becoming clear that the company's founders, Bob and Harvey Weinstein, were thinking differently about chasing Oscars. Yes, the story of how Oscars campaigns blew up is inextricably and unfortunately linked to disgraced film executive Harvey Weinstein.
And how his company used the Oscars to break into the industry. It was integral to their business plan. They needed the attention and the awards to make money on these movies. Bob and Harvey Weinstein's business strategy in the beginning came down to a kind of bet.
It centered on buying and distributing smaller indie movies and foreign films that had already been made. These movies might impress film buffs, things like Paley the Conqueror or Sex Lies and Video Tape. But they sometimes didn't do well at the box office. Still, Miramax would make a big Oscar push, which went against the prevailing wisdom.
No one's going to take a movie back then that had failed at the box office and campaign it. Who's going to throw a good money under bed, right? He would do that. Because as Miramax discovered early on, if they could campaign aggressively enough to get Oscar nominations, they could then do a wide release of the film in theaters across the country and use the nomination buzz to turbo charge ticket sales.
So all of a sudden, if you're getting awards attention for these films, it was easier for them to get more television sales, airplane sales, international sales, and then came the ancillary markets like the VHS cassettes than the DVDs as an endless stream of how a movie could expand on its profit. By the early 90s, Harvey Weinstein had already started to use the aggressive campaign tactics and stunts he'd become known for. For example, as part of the campaign for the movie My Left Foot, the film star Daniel Day Lewis testified in Congress in support of the Americans with Disabilities Act. It was a way to get headlines and maybe align the film with a higher purpose that could appeal to Academy voters.
And the Oscar goes to Daniel Day Lewis and my left foot. Miramax's bet to use Oscar buzz to turn indie films into box office hits started to pay off. In 1993, they were bought by Disney and with all that financial firepower, they got more into the business of actually making films, with a stable of A-list talent. But the campaign season that many see as a turning point where it became clear that Oscar's campaigns had changed came in 1999.
That was the year that Miramax went up against Steven Spielberg's World War II epic, saving private Ryan. Some pride in the 101st lost three of his brothers and he's got to take it home. It's not that easy to find one particular soldier in the whole damn war. For most of the campaign season, saving private Ryan had been seen as the clear front runner, an Oscar winning director telling the story of D-Day.
But just a few months before the Oscars, Miramax released Shakespeare in Love, this irreverent romantic comedy about a struggling young William Shakespeare. Meet young Will Shakespeare. I've just done it to write sonnet, you mean it, play it. He's out of luck.
I'd say this step out is closed. Out of money. I've still owed money for this place. What is money to you and me?
And out of ideas. Over the next couple months, saving private Ryan and Shakespeare in Love waged massive competing campaigns. They flooded newspapers and magazines with four-year consideration ads and made sure their stars were all over TV. Tony Angelotti worked on the Shakespeare in Love campaign, and he says winning Best Picture still felt like this impossible long shot.
Up until the moment the winner was announced. He remembers being in the wings at the 1999 Academy Awards ceremony when Harrison Ford walked out on stage. There are five nominated films for Best Picture. They are.
And Harrison Ford announcing the winner seemed like a bad omen, because he'd been the one to announce Spielberg's previous win for Schindler's list. And Harrison comes up and I'm 100% sure it's going to be, saving private Ryan. 100% there wasn't a part of me that thought Shakespeare was going to win. Harrison was going to give it to Stephen, just like he did on Schindler's.
He reads the envelope and he looks now and he never even lifts his head. And he says, Shakespeare in Love. I like sort of lost consciousness. I like my back went against the wall.
Something had just happened that wasn't meant to happen. You know, this was alternate reality. And Tony was not the only one who felt like reality had just shifted. After the break, a new band of Hollywood outsiders sweeps into town with their sights set on Oscar Gold.
And the campaign circus blows up. The surreal horror film Back Rooms is a smash. The director is a 20 year old YouTuber and it's based on his popular web series. Why is this online phenomenon taking off at the box office?
We get into it on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour. Listen via the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Darian Woods here. Commercials use all sorts of tricks to get us to remember their brands.
Surprise, nostalgia, repetition. In our latest bonus episode, we look at the science behind this. We're the neuroscientist. When you're surprised, there's a whole cavalcade of responses in the brain that can help make the brain more plastic and receptive to whatever information is being processed.
You can check that out now if you're a Planet Money Plus listener. And if that's you, thank you so much for your support. If it's not, it could be. You could get bonus episodes, sponsor free listening, and support the work of Planet Money.
Go to plus.mpr.org. Okay, so Miramax's aggressive and successful campaign strategy had set off a kind of arms race over Oscars. Miramax and the Weinstein companies took campaigning and they just turned it into a blood sport. Entertainment journalist Matt Bellany again.
It was all about winning. And that ethos has informed the past two decades of Oscar campaigning. Other Hollywood studios started upping their campaign game in order to compete. And many of the campaign strategists who cut their teeth at Miramax moved on to prominent positions throughout the industry.
And Matt says that while Oscar's campaigns have gotten even bigger and more expensive over the last couple decades, many of the revenue streams that made Miramax's Oscar strategy so profitable have started to disappear. And the major economic force that's been driving those changes can be boiled down to two words. Streaming companies. Netflix and Hulu and Amazon and Apple and all these others came into the game.
And they decided that awards are a differentiator for them. And they started spending huge amounts of money to win them. About a decade ago, Netflix officially kicked off the streaming era when they made their fateful pivot from a DVD mail order service to a full-on production studio. Within a few years, they'd set their sights on competing with big Hollywood movie studios at their own game.
And that meant courting Oscar winning directors like Martin Scorsese and Alfonso Coron. And just as the old Hollywood studios had viewed the Academy Awards as a way of attracting and retaining talent, so too did Netflix. They wanted to work with the top talents. The top talents won to win awards.
So Netflix was able to say, we're not going to get you a wide theatrical release. But we can campaign for awards like anybody else and we can get you nominated. And in fact, because of their deep pockets, Netflix was willing and able to campaign on a massive scale orchestrated by a seasoned strategist. They hired one of the biggest campaigners, Lisa Taback.
She was a Harvey Weinstein acolyte back at the Miramax in Weinstein Company Days. They bought her company, brought her in-house, and she's got dozens of people that work for her and global awards campaigns. We reached out to Netflix for an interview, but the company declined. What is clear is that Lisa Taback's first year at the company involved one of the most visible campaigns in Oscar's history, the one for Alfonso Coron's film, Roma.
The Roma campaign is considered the high point of the Netflix Oscar campaign. They spent by most estimates 30, 40 million dollars on that campaign and they were everywhere. Netflix would not confirm those estimates, they'd refuse to give specifics. But keep in mind that Roma's production budget was around 15 million dollars, which means Netflix likely spent much more to market the film during the 2019 Academy Award season than what the film actually cost to make.
You could not walk down the street without seeing a billboard or a bus ad. They were doing crazy things with the trades. Now as a streaming company, Netflix faced a kind of technical problem when it came to qualifying for the Oscars. At the time, the Academy typically required films to open theatrically for at least a week in New York and Los Angeles.
In years past, Netflix had been able to qualify by making deals with some movie theaters, but they'd gotten a lot of pushback. And in 2019, they decided to start buying their own movie theaters. So qualifying became less of a hassle. And in another example of infrastructure level investment, Netflix decided to basically guarantee that its four-year consideration ads would be considered by buying up most of the billboards on the sunset strip, where a huge number of Academy voters, like film executives, actors, writers, all commute in LA's notorious traffic to get to their offices and film sets.
So if you go down Sunset Boulevard, all the famous gigantic billboards, most of them are Netflix because they bought them and they use them for their awards campaigns. Now, some of these movies may sound a little over the top, but let's take a step back from them and think about why Netflix was jumping into the Oscars race. By offering these big cinematic films from some of the most respected filmmakers in the industry, Netflix was making a play for market share of the movie business. On the one hand, they were signaling to the world that their subscribers would no longer need to go to the theater to experience high cinema.
And on the other hand, they were trying to put streaming companies on equal footing with Hollywood studios in the minds of the film community. In the end, Roma did pick up 10 nominations and won for Best Foreign Language Film and Best Director, but they did not win for Best Picture. In part, Matt Bellany thinks that's because many Academy voters see Netflix's streaming business as a kind of threat. For some of these old-time Hollywood hardliners, they don't like the fact that Netflix doesn't release movies and theaters.
They just don't like it. But like it or not, Netflix and its fellow streamers had arrived at the Oscars, at a time when their models were changing two of the big ways that Oscars can be profitable. First, the streamers have chipped away at box office earnings, because you can now watch a universe of entertainment at your house for the price of a single movie ticket. And second, they've basically replaced DVD and VHS sales.
They've been siphoning away two major components of the Oscar bump that the Miramax strategy relied on. Now, as there are more entertainment choices, as streaming services have proliferated, and more importantly, as streaming services have joined the Oscar race, there is less of that business to go around. And you see film after film being in the Oscar race and the economics not really matching up. Which finally brings us to the fundamental question at the core of this episode.
Okay, so if the direct returns from an Oscar nomination or a win are less directly profitable than back when movie theaters and VHS tapes like Brain Supreme, then why are all these different companies spending, you know, almost more money than ever to campaign? Couple reasons. First, Matt says, it's important to remember how these different players in the Oscars race actually make their money. The streamers, for instance, are at their core technology companies.
Places like Amazon and Apple are using the Oscars to build up their brands. They're banking on that Oscar buzz to help them get more people onto Amazon Prime, or get them to buy Apple devices. If you can say we are Apple TV plus, home of the Oscar Best Picture winner, Koda, that translates into subscriptions and viewership, typically. But this new wave of tech money hasn't proved to be the only way to get Oscar wins and nominations.
Some players are still using a version of Miramax's model to punch above their weight. Smaller independent studios like A24 and Neon, they've managed to find Oscar's success over the past few years, in part because of the changing demographics of the Academy itself. In 2015, the Academy was called out for being overwhelmingly white. And since then, they've invited several thousand new members to join.
These new members are younger, more diverse, and they live all around the world. And many of these voters seem to be more sympathetic to smaller independent movies and foreign films. Right now, about a quarter that the Academy does not live in America. And that is a big change.
And you've seen it manifest in a number of foreign language films, getting nominations and even winning in previous years. Look at Parasite in 2020. Parasite won Best Picture. And that's the first time a foreign language film has ever won Best Picture.
And finally, there are the major Hollywood studios, who've also had to up their campaign game to compete for A-list actors and directors. Take the campaign around this year's Best Picture front-runner, Oppenheimer. Matt says that for Universal, the studio, running a robust Oscars campaign is just the cost of doing business with someone like director Christopher Nolan. Because if Universal's awards team can help push Oppenheimer into the ranks of Oscar winners, they stand a better chance of getting Nolan's next film.
And spending $10, $20, $30 million on an Oscars campaign, that is a drop in the bucket compared to what Christopher Nolan could bring to Universal if he stays. Oppenheimer, for instance, has already grossed nearly $1 billion. Plus, Matt points out, even if the Oscars bump is less pronounced than in the past, there's still economic value to getting that Best Picture brand halo on your film. That movie is going to be in the Universal Library forever, and it will be more valuable than other three-hour biopics who did well at the box office, because it will have won Best Picture.
Right, it's kind of lifetime earnings forever changed if it's in that Pantheon. Yeah, these companies make a lot of money on the old movies and licensing them out, and putting them in different packages and on different platforms. So they take longer these days to recoup the cost of a major campaign than in the heyday of movie theaters and DVDs. But every time they license or sell the rights to a winning film, they'll be able to collect on that Best Picture premium.
Which is why it seems safe to say that the Oscars campaign circus is here to stay, with or without your consideration. Coming up on the next Planet Money, Rum, an island paradise, and a scheme that turned two American territories into bitter rivals. Tell you man, this thing made enemies for us. It's a story of how hundreds of millions of federal tax dollars wound up in the pockets of some of the biggest liquor companies in the world.
Those were their warm wars. Next time on Planet Money. Today's episode was produced by Emma Peasley and edited by Jess Chang. It was engineered by Cine Alfredo and fact-checked by Sierra Juarez.
Alex Goldmark is our executive producer. Special thanks to Nina Gregory, Mondley Delvarko, and Rose Friedman. I'm Lexi Horwitz-Gazi, this is NPR. Thanks for listening.
Brazil used to have one of the fastest growing economies in the world. People called it the country of the future. There are songs, Ubrasí, Váil, Phaí, Dufutur, because it seems like we have it all, man. But then the music stopped.
On the Planet Money podcast, a lot of countries these days aren't rich, they are poor, they're just kind of stuck in the middle. Why is that? Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.