Oscars crack down on studio skulduggery in race for votes

Films nominated for best picture at the Oscars could be disqualified from the awards if their backers are found to have indulged in campaigning tricks.

Frank Pierson, president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, said that anyone found breaking the rules would face tough disciplinary action.

He said that the frantic race to secure votes at the annual awards was spinning out of control.

Studios with films nominated for Oscars are known to throw lavish parties and launch media offensives in a bid to impress Academy voters. And publicists for competing films do not shrink from spreading stories about their competitors in the press.

In the past, the worst sanction offenders had to suffer was having their tickets withdrawn. They are now threatened with suspension or expulsion from the Academy. In particularly bad cases, films up for best picture consideration might be kicked out.

Mr Pierson, 78, best known for writing Cat Ballou, Cool Hand Luke and Dog Day Afternoon, told Daily Variety yesterday: "Academy members know you can't buy a vote, but the public perception is growing that voters are influenced by campaigning ... that would be a disaster for all of us: the Academy, the studios, and the Oscar winners themselves, because it tarnishes the honour that goes with the award."

He said that he had issued a new set of rules for next year's competition.

The Oscars have increasingly come to resemble political campaigns in recent years. Obscene amounts of money get sloshed around, people's good characters are gratuitously denigrated and conflicts of interest abound as studios with films to push throw parties.

This year, Hollywood cried foul over a series of adverts showcasing the glowing praise of an Oscar-winning director, Robert Wise, for his colleague Martin Scorsese.

It did not help that the Wise piece turned out to have been ghost-written by a publicist for Miramax, the company behind Scorsese's epic film Gangs of New York, starring Daniel Day Lewis and Cameron Diaz, which was up for several Oscars. The fact that Miramax's blustering co-chair, Harvey Weinstein, had declared publicly that he would stop at nothing to get Scorsese his first best director statuette did not help either. Scorsese lost out to Roman Polanski for The Pianist. Gangs of New York failed to win any other Oscars.

In 2002, the scandal concerned A Beautiful Mind, the eventual best picture winner.

Publicists for competing films denigrated the real John Nash, the mathematician played by Russell Crowe in the biopic. The film glossed over several unsavoury aspects of Mr Nash's life.

Mr Pierson insisted that most people in Hollywood were in favour of cracking down on the worst abuses. And many would acknowledge that accusing a recovering former schizophrenic of being a closet Nazi and a homosexual pervert didseem unfair.

But the notion that there is any real integrity to restore to the Academy Awards process is laughable to anyone who actually knows the film business.

Mr Pierson said members needed to be seen to "vote with their conscience", but there is no compulsion for any of them to see the nominated films. Many would concede that the only reason A Beautiful Mind won was that industry types felt well-disposed towards Ron Howard, the film's director, and Brian Grazer, the film's producer. Crowe lost out to Denzel Washington for the best oscar but his co-star Jennifer Connelly won the best supporting actress statuette. The film had received mixed reviews.

In some of the obscurer categories, such as costume design and make-up, almost nobody makes an objective assessment.

They either vote for their friends, or plump for a film that they happen to like for other reasons. In many cases, Academy members will vote in the categories where they have strong feelings, then let their children or their friends fill out the rest.

Mr Pierson's crackdown is not without its hypocrisies. The new rules disapprove of inviting prominent Academy members to parties thrown on behalf of nominated films.

But Mr Pierson himself was a host last year at a party for Y Tu Mama Tambien, the Mexican film nominated for the best original screenplay award.