LA Times: 'Artist' win is a tribute to Harvey Weinstein's te

[silentfilm]

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/ne ... 2136.story

'Artist' win is a tribute to Harvey Weinstein's tenacity, vision
The film from Michel Hazanavicius bucks the odds by being a favorite that actually wins.

By Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times Film Critic

February 27, 2012
"The Artist"has won the Oscar for best picture and I'm speechless.

It's not lack of passion for the film that has robbed me of the power of words; it's that I felt so strongly that my thoughts were geared to how I would react should the worst happen, but like the flabbergasted editors from "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," victory was something I didn't expect.

I knew, of course, that "The Artist" was considered the favorite, but I wasn't so sure. As someone who first heard about this project while it was quietly filming on the streets and back lots of Hollywood, I was intensely aware of how enormous a leap it would be for what is basically a French silent picture that didn't even think it would get American distribution to walk off with what the ABC telecast called "the most coveted award in motion pictures."

The favorites in previous years, from"The King's Speech"to the seemingly outside-the-box"Slumdog Millionaire,"were less of a longshot than the film that turned out to be the first silent winner since 1929. I feared that the members would be irked at having their choice taken for granted and vote for something else in a kind of institutional protest. Believe me, things like that can happen.

It won, I believe, because the final reaction of the academy members was identical to the initial reaction of viewers at Cannes, and to viewers everywhere the film has played. This is a film that people are both suspicious of going into and delighted with once they experience it.

While "The Artist" was cleaning up at the Film Independent Spirit Awards on Saturday, the Weinstein Co. team, from the leader on down, looked more concerned than celebratory. They sensed this race was tighter than the pundits were saying.

The way the awards were structured Sunday night didn't exactly calm anyone down."Hugo,"which along with"War Horse"was the closest this year had to a traditional Oscar-type film, came out of the box like gangbusters, winning the first two awards announced, including one, cinematography, that was widely expected to go to "The Tree of Life's" Emmanuel Lubezki.

Things got worse before they got better. "Hugo" picked up two sound awards and at the midpoint of the program was leading "The Artist" four Oscars to one, though that one, for costumes, was a head-to-head victory over Martin Scorsese's film.

But like that celebrated come-from-behind racehorse, the great Seabiscuit, "The Artist" finished impressively strong, taking all three of the top-tier awards it was nominated for, including lead actor for Jean Dujardin, best director for Michel Hazanavicius and, of course, best picture.

To borrow a line from Sally Field's celebrated acceptance speech for"Norma Rae," the voters liked it, they really liked it, it's just that simple, and no amount of sophistry or carping about how the film wasn't this or wasn't that kept them from their appointed voting rounds.

The film also had the support of Harvey Weinstein, and that is no small thing. When Tom Cruise announced the final award, the TV cameras showed Weinstein with a look of unmistakable satisfaction on his face, giving a high five to producer Thomas Langmann, the man who had first agreed to put money into this highly unlikely production.

For whatever else is said about the man — and there probably isn't anything that hasn't been said about him, both good and bad — Weinstein is someone who is passionate about film. Only someone who felt that way would embrace "The Artist" and see the potential for this kind of acclaim for it, let alone do the kind of heavy lifting that made success possible.

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Copyright © 2012, Los Angeles Times

[silentfilm]

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/movies/ ... icius.html

Oscars 2012: 'Artist' director doesn't expect wave of silent films
February 27, 2012 | 8:30 am

“The Artist” director Michel Hazanavicius thanked filmmaker Billy Wilder three times in his acceptance speech, but backstage at the Oscars, the best director winner said he would have thanked him “thousands of times” if he could.

“He’s the perfect director. He’s the soul of Hollywood,” Hazanavicius said of the “Some Like It Hot” and “Sunset Blvd.” filmmaker.

As to whether his awards-sweeping black-and-white, almost entirely silent film will influence future filmmakers, he claimed that “The Artist” alone couldn’t make a change in the film industry because “one movie doesn’t change things … 10 movies do,” but if it did, “I would be very proud of it.”

Taking home best picture to cap a successful awards season, “The Artist” wasn’t held back by its throwback format and didn’t have trouble getting acclaim once it started screening at festivals such as Cannes.

“It’s not selling, not promoting. You just smile and say, ‘Thank you,’” Hazanavicius said of what he called a “not difficult” process of spreading awareness about the film.

“The Artist” producer Thomas Langmann, meanwhile, gave the majority of the credit for the film’s best picture win to Harvey Weinstein. Langmann recalled inviting Weinstein to France a month before Cannes to view the movie — one with a French director and cast the producer had barely heard of.

“I was supposed to leave him alone in the screening room, and I checked to make sure that the beginning was going OK, and I heard him laugh and laugh, so I stayed through the whole screening,” Langmann said. “He loved the movie, and I knew that Harvey could sometimes be very enthusiastic. But I saw in his eyes and his attitude that he really cared for the movie, and he believed that maybe we could be here today. I must say I think he’s the only distributor, even with this very special movie, to be able to take it to where it is today.”

“The Artist,” which won five Academy Awards on Sunday night, also took home statuettes for original score, lead actor and costume design.

[boblipton]

I thought The Artist's win was a tribute to The Artist.

Bob

[Battra92]

I thought The Artist's win was a tribute to The Artist.

Bob

You'd think that, but that's not how Hollywood works. For example the Iranian movie winning Best foreign language film was a total political move.

[buskeat]

I thought The Artist's win was a tribute to The Artist.

Bob

You'd think that, but that's not how Hollywood works. For example the Iranian movie winning Best foreign language film was a total political move.

Confidentially, A Separation was actually the best of the five films nominated. Once in a great while, a film wins that deserves to win.

[alcibiades]

I thought The Artist's win was a tribute to The Artist.

Bob

You'd think that, but that's not how Hollywood works. For example the Iranian movie winning Best foreign language film was a total political move.

Actually, if you've been keeping track, A Separation was one of the most consistently critically lauded film that came out last year. I've been reading about how much critics loved this movie long before award season. This is actually one of the rarer recent years where the winner of the Foreign Language Film category was by far the most critically acclaimed foreign language film of the year.

A better example would be the year Shakespeare in Love won for Best Picture, and there was a lot of talk about how Shakespeare in Love was a good movie, but not that good, and how much of its success was due to how skillful the Weinsteins are at promoting Miramax movies to Academy members, basically more or less what this article is talking about. It's actually a lot of work to run a campaign within the industry to draw attention to movies one wants considered, and considering the Academy only has around 5000 members, a few words placed by influential people within the industry goes a long way. Studio cafefully prioritize which movies they want to get behind and heavily promote for the Oscars, and this year Miramax decided to back The Artist all the way.

[missdupont]

It's not Miramax anymore, as Disney owns that, but the Weinstein Company.

[alcibiades]

Ah, thanks for the correction.

[Mike Gebert]

Sure, the Weinsteins are good at playing the game, but you can't win with a picture nobody likes. They're good at finding pictures that can win and getting them there, is what they are, and anything else is sour grapes.

Now, MGM winning all those awards for Ben-Hur-- THAT was making a win happen by telling people what to vote for if they liked their jobs.

[Frederica]

Sure, the Weinsteins are good at playing the game, but you can't win with a picture nobody likes. They're good at finding pictures that can win and getting them there, is what they are, and anything else is sour grapes.

Now, MGM winning all those awards for Ben-Hur-- THAT was making a win happen by telling people what to vote for if they liked their jobs.

Er...but a lot of people like Ben Hur, I'm one of them. (Yes, I know, I'm not supposed to. But I do.) Weinstein & Co are indeed good at finding films people will like and they're unparalleled at planning effective publicity campaigns. Weinstein likes films and is passionate about the films he champions, which may partially explain why he's so good at it. That certainly harks back to the old moguls, who knew their movies, loved them, and were nothing if not populist. When they weren't busy conspiring against their own employees, and buying up entire film libraries so they could destroy them, of course. Full time job, that.

[Mike Gebert]

Ben-Hur's merits aside, MGM did run a pretty famously thuggish campaign to get everyone in the industry to vote for it.

[Frederica]

Ben-Hur's merits aside, MGM did run a pretty famously thuggish campaign to get everyone in the industry to vote for it.

Ah, I getcha. How much pre-Oscar hoopla was there back then, since pretty much the entire Academy was made up of people employed by the studios? Come to think of it, were Oscar ballots secret then, or are they now?

[Mike Gebert]

Well, short answer is that it was very cozy in the early years until Frank Capra and others broke the Academy as a company union and forced it into being more of a cultural organization in the mid-30s. Studios would push their employees to vote for things but it didn't always work-- my argument that the voting was pretty clean is always that Wilson didn't win despite Darryl Zanuck's huge push, which seemed to backfire (and led to Going My Way, a popular favorite, winning instead). Nevertheless, there are certainly examples of studio pressure succeeding in at least getting a nomination (Doctor Dolittle being the most notorious one). There's also a story that Louis B. Mayer warned MGMers not to vote for Romeo and Juliet, now that he was free of Thalberg and more interested in promoting Luise Rainer than Norma Shearer. I don't give the Louis B. destroying his stars thing credit most of the time, but in that case he seemed to have sound strategic reasons on both a new star and personal power level to steer voting away from Thalberg's last project.

(By the way, if you want to know the one pretty much indisputably crooked award, it was Wallace Beery's for The Champ, a tie with Frederic March for Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde. March's name was announced at the banquet and then there was a rustle in the back of the room and suddenly it was announced that hey, there'd actually been a tie and an MGM picture won! Which wasn't even a tie, since the rule then, bizarrely, was that within 3 votes counted as a tie.)

Anyway, I think the public campaigning (even in terms of industry publications) didn't really kick in until the post-studio era because it didn't need to, but it certainly existed by the time of, say, Chill Wills' notoriously cornball ads for his nomination for The Alamo. More common before then was that you campaigned by getting Hedda and Louella to talk you up.

[buskeat]

Anyway, I think the public campaigning (even in terms of industry publications) didn't really kick in until the post-studio era because it didn't need to, but it certainly existed by the time of, say, Chill Wills' notoriously cornball ads for his nomination for The Alamo. More common before then was that you campaigned by getting Hedda and Louella to talk you up.

Gosh knows where I thought I read it, but didn't Mary Pickford campaign for her Best Actress award for Coquette? I swear I read that somewhere.

[BankofAmericasSweetheart]

Yeah Mary Pickford invited all the voters to her Pickfair place and had tea with all of them and told them to vote for her otherwise bad things would happen. I think it's in a few biographies about her.

I'm kidding for the last part but if you're one of the founders of the Academy and you have a husband who is president of the Academy and you invite all the Academy members for "tea" at your place, I think you're campaigning for a win. IMO it's not that she was a bad actress in general, for the most part her roles were always amazing to look at, it's her role in Coquette(1929) that can be credited as being one of her worse performances of all time and ironically it's the only role that she won an Oscar for.

The Academy should have just given her the first honorary oscar instead if they wanted to give her an award for being great, please don't give her an award for a movie worthy of Mystery Science Theater commentary...

[Mike Gebert]

I don't count the first couple of years because there wasn't really voting-- there was a five-person jury, the Central Board of Judges. The first year, they started to give one of the two Best Picture awards to The Crowd, and Louis B. Mayer stepped in and said no way, I don't want to encourage anybody else at the studio to be making depressing stuff like that. So they picked Sunrise instead.

The next year it was even cozier-- Warner Baxter was the only winner who wasn't a founding member of the Academy, and it was well known that Pickford (whose husband was president of the Academy) had invited the jury to tea at Pickfair to press her case in person. There was enough bad press and gossip after that that the jury system was abolished and they went to voting by the full membership.

The system was cleaner then but it was still a pretty cozy company union until the fights over the Academy's union role finally led to it being replaced in that by the DGA, SAG, etc. In the mid-30s membership expanded enormously and it basically escaped big studio control though the studio that employed the most people, MGM, still was likeliest to win. On the other hand, the fact that Universal, RKO and Columbia (none of which were exactly heavy on clout) all managed Best Picture wins in the early 30s certainly suggests a system based on genuine popularity over studio politics even as early as the third year.