Film
Hollywood’s Bull Market in Ego
By DAVID CARR
AGAINST the backdrop of a historic presidential election and a vortex of economic dysfunction, the burgeoning Oscar season seems even sillier than usual. After all, who really cares about the throwdown for best supporting actor at a time when the citizenry seems poised for a run on its own banks?

But watching Hollywood hug itself in an orgy of self-congratulation has some real psychic benefit. Who among us will not enjoy the diversion of watching someone opening an envelope that contains something besides the ashes of your 401(k)? Besides, there is always a bull market in ego, and the movie business will be celebrating the 81st annual Academy Awards on Sunday, Feb. 22, at the Kodak Theater with or without your consent.

As the season kicked into gear, some suggested that Oscar backers would rein in spending out of deference to hard times and the bottom line — Peter Bart, the editor in chief of Variety, wrote a column yowling about the lack of Oscar ads in his trade paper — but profligacy remains the default setting for the silly season. In just the past two weeks the producers, actors and directors of this season’s contenders have been crisscrossing the skies between Los Angeles and New York, holding star-studded screenings, indulging in lavish parties and all but licking the faces of media types and Academy voters in hopes of gaining that ineffable edge. The Carpetbagger, a k a the Bagger, has been on the circuit on your behalf, enduring abundant buffets and spurning proffered cocktails while occasionally saying yes to a portion of Oscar spin.

It’s helpful to think of the Oscars as a horse race of human thoroughbreds, with backers wagering millions on the marketing of hopefuls, all fighting for the prestige and box-office boost that comes from appending “nominated” laurels to their ads. Ultimately, however, when it comes to Academy Awards, there is best picture, and then there is everything else.

This year, by the Bagger’s count, seven or eight films have a shot at best picture. The consensus, in no particular order — well, O.K., in a little bit of a hierarchy — includes “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” “Slumdog Millionaire,” “Frost/Nixon,” “Revolutionary Road,” “Milk,” “Doubt” and “The Reader.” And a surprise may be waiting in the wings: Clint Eastwood, a durable crush object of the Academy, has a habit of swinging out of the trees late in the game, as he did two years ago with “Letters From Iwo Jima,” so keep an eye on “Gran Torino.”

With almost three months to go, a great deal can happen. The chemistry of Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman in “Australia” may bring to mind oil and water, but the Academy may swoon over the epic intent of the director, Baz Luhrmann (“Moulin Rouge!” and “Romeo + Juliet”). The Walt Disney Company is carpet-bombing voters with DVDs to argue that the robotic glories of “Wall-E” should not be pigeonholed into animation alone. And there’s always a chance that smaller films like “Rachel Getting Married,” with a searing performance by Anne Hathaway, or “The Wrestler,” featuring the muscular return of Mickey Rourke, might sneak in.

The Screen Actors Guild makes up almost a fourth of the approximately 5,800 voting members of the Academy, which means that movies that contain big, juicy roles for highly respected actors — like “Doubt,” with Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman — will always have the edge over remarkable filmed spectacle, say, “The Dark Knight.” And this year’s awards will be particularly driven by some star turns: Frank Langella in “Frost/Nixon,” Sean Penn in “Milk,” Leonardo DiCaprio in “Revolutionary Road” and Brad Pitt in “Benjamin Button.”

Kate Winslet has had so many good roles in so many good movies that it is hard to believe she has never won an Oscar after being nominated five times. This year she reunites with Mr. DiCaprio in “Revolutionary Road.” It’s doomed love again for the former passengers of the Titanic, only this time the iceberg is played by a chilly suburban enclave that crushes their spirits and dreams. But she will probably be competing against the likes of Ms. Streep and Ms. Hathaway, as well as Cate Blanchett, in “Benjamin Button.” And that’s not even counting a possible fifth contender: Kate Winslet, for her much-discussed lead as a former Nazi prison guard on trial in “The Reader.”

It means that Ms. Winslet will be doing wind sprints to promote both her films. Many actors make it clear that they only tread the carpets of such events with their noses held. Ms. Winslet displays no such haughtiness.

“I’m at work right now; this is very much part of what I do,” she said, surrounded by well-wishers at the “21” Club who enjoyed an open bar before sawing into massive filets of beef after a screening of “Revolutionary Road” in New York a little over a week ago. “This is part of the commitment that I make when I agree to do a film, and I am very happy to do it.”

Ms. Winslet makes it look pretty easy, standing there eating from a basket of frites and smiling through an avalanche of double kisses. She even found time to slip off one of her shoes to answer an admirer’s query about her smashing footwear’s provenance. (The black satin peep-toe stilettos were made for her hard-to-fit size 11 feet by Rickard Shah.) Her husband and director, Sam Mendes, sitting nearby, said he’s a little less skilled at the process, “but then there is far less demand for me that there is for Kate.”

Each Oscar season has its own character. Last year it was a season of dark indie wonders, which left us all wondering whether the movie about the homicidal maniac, “No Country for Old Men,” or the film about the capitalist sociopath, “There Will Be Blood,” would win the day. This year, with the big studios and their specialty divisions in the mix, everything is falling late because few wanted to open their serious, important Oscar film into the headwind of that historic election. Now that that’s settled, the films and this season’s flurry of subplots are rearing into view.

Among them: the return to the competition of Harvey Weinstein, after a few years somewhat sidelined, with “The Reader.” A full-contact auteur who all but invented the modern Oscar campaign, Mr. Weinstein plays to win, using his contacts with the press and the Academy to lobby (intensely) for his films. This year he and Scott Rudin, another producer who knows his way around an Oscar, had a dust-up over the release date of “The Reader,” with Mr. Rudin deciding to take his name off the credits and put his muscle behind “Doubt” and “Revolutionary Road.” And many will be watching to see if this is that year that Mr. Pitt, whose work is sometime obscured by his celebrity legend, will be taken seriously by the Academy.

Oscar ninnies are also curious whether an outsized performance by a supporting actor — Michael Shannon’s work as a deranged one-man Greek chorus in “Revolutionary Road” comes to mind — can overcome the industry’s need to memorialize the departed Heath Ledger by picking his final role as the Joker in “The Dark Knight.”

Sometimes a film’s Oscar chances have less to do with the cinema artifact itself than the aura built up over the course of the campaign through ads, news articles and events. At the premiere of “Frost/Nixon” about two weeks ago, media heavies showed up — hey, look, there’s Bill O’Reilly talking to Mort Zuckerman — and some then made their way to a decorated Four Seasons restaurant that made Pompeii seem chaste to snack on caviar and gobs of lobster.

With the actual David Frost (now a Sir) walking around the room, Ron Howard, who won best picture and best director for “A Beautiful Mind” in 2002 and is the director and a producer of “Frost/Nixon,” said he was happy for any kind of sizzle, Oscar or otherwise.

“A movie like this, a serious movie, needs champions,” he said, squeezed into a hallway between the Grill Room and the Pool Room at the Four Seasons. Several hundred invitees did laps from one room to the other, backslapping the film’s stars, including Mr. Langella, Michael Sheen and Kevin Bacon, and squeezing past well-wishers that included Brian Williams, Tina Brown and Steve Kroft.

Many of the events are aimed at breaking films out of various slots they have been assigned. James Schamus, chief executive of Focus Features, said “Milk,” a biopic of the slain gay-rights hero Harvey Milk, will pick up some heat from the current angst over Proposition 8, but added that he doesn’t want the movie to be seen merely as historical homework. “This is an epic, with big crowd scenes, a huge scope and an amazing performance from Sean Penn,” he said. “We think it is a great big Academy movie, and I have no problem being part of the process because we think we have the goods.”

They sure had a great, big party, hosted by the Cinema Society and Details magazine. The event, at the Bowery Hotel following the New York screening almost two weeks ago, was so jammed that guests ended up eating cross-legged on the floor as other revelers stepped in and around them.

No Oscar season would feel complete without its Cinderella, and this year the glass slipper lands on the bare foot of “Slumdog Millionaire,” a movie about a desperately poor young man who finds the answers for the India version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” in his tortured past and present. It has some pedigree — its director, Danny Boyle, also did “Trainspotting” — but few expected that a film rendered partly in Hindi would be in the thick of the best picture race. Then again, it opens with a chase in Mumbai and ends with a dance number, so perhaps it isn’t that odd.

Though economic gloom hovers over the country, many filmmakers and studios are jumping into the Oscar fray with more enthusiasm than ever. “When you think about it, having a dinner for some Academy members and media people is a very good investment and not terribly expensive,” said Peggy Siegal, who arranges many such fetes. As she spoke, she made sure the crowd fresh from a screening of “Slumdog Millionaire” landed safely at its tables at Circo.

The tension and oodles of coverage will build with each passing week until it’s time to strap on the bow ties and ball gowns to hear the final verdict.

“We all say that it is nice to be nominated,” Mr. Howard said. “But when you are sitting there, you are really, really hoping that when a name gets called, it happens to be yours.”