Daniel Day-Lewis, Leonardo DiCaprio in Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York
Nicolas Chartier, one of the four Oscar-nominated producers of The Hurt Locker, has been penalized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences because of e-mails he sent out a couple of weeks ago asking various Academy members to vote for his low-budgeted Iraq War drama and not for "a $500M film" — that's James Cameron's Avatar, The Hurt Locker's chief competitor in the Best Picture category.
Chartier's aggressive campaigning caught the media's attention, but he's hardly the first Oscar nominee — or potential Oscar nominee — whose tactics have raised eyebrows at the Academy and elsewhere. In fact, Academy rules regarding vote-soliciting campaigns became more strict following a scandal in early 2003.
That was when former Academy president and two-time Best Director winner Robert Wise (West Side Story, The Sound of Music) was credited for an opinion piece published in the Los Angeles Daily News and the Long Beach Press-Telegram. In it, Wise extolled the virtues of Martin Scorsese's period drama Gangs of New York, a Miramax production up for ten Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor (Daniel Day-Lewis). Wise's piece was then used by Miramax in its own Oscar ads for their film with the headline "Two time Academy Award winner Robert Wise declares Scorsese deserves the Oscar for Gangs of New York."
If it weren't enough that a former Academy president was seen in print blatantly pushing for a nominee, many Academy members became outraged when it was revealed that Wise hadn't actually written the Op-Ed column. Miramax publicist Murray Weissman, who also served on the Academy's public relations branch executive committee, had been the actual author. (According to a Los Angeles Times report by John Horn, Wise had initially said that a friend named Michael Thomas had helped him draft the piece.)
Some Academy members were so incensed that "an undisclosed number" — as per Horn's article — asked for their ballots to be returned so they could change their votes, while Oscar-winning director Barry Levinson (Rain Man) said the Miramax ad was an example of "extremely vulgar" vote-soliciting tactics. According to Entertainment Weekly, "even Scorsese was unhappy, with his publicist telling the Times that he was unaware that what seemed to be an unsolicited tribute from a friend would be used as an ad on his behalf."
It certainly wasn't the first time that Miramax and its chief Harvey Weinstein had been accused of aggressive campaigning. Following the unexpected 1999 Best Picture win of Miramax's Shakespeare in Love over DreamWorks' Saving Private Ryan, New York Daily News reviewer Jack Mathews wrote an open letter to Weinstein, stating "Your campaigns are obnoxious, and they do create the appearance of influence-buying. They're tainting the Oscar process, making Miramax a Cold War villain, and demeaning the films themselves."