GANGS OF NEW YORK’s Oscar Campaign Scandal II

Leonardo DiCaprio in Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York

Oscar Campaign Scandal: Robert Wise, Miramax & GANGS OF NEW YORK Part I
Back to Robert Wise (right) and Gangs of New York: The plot got even thicker when Murray Weissman and others later claimed that Wise himself had approached Miramax after reading another Op-Ed piece, this one published in Variety (Feb. 3, 2003) and penned by two-time Oscar-winning screenwriter William Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men), who called Gangs of New York "a mess" and Martin Scorsese "a giant ape director" who disregarded his screenwriters. (In his article, John Horn states that Miramax approached Wise.)
A Business Weekly piece by Ron Grover questioned the Academy’s double standard. Why [...]

Oscar Campaign Scandal: Robert Wise, Miramax & GANGS OF NEW YORK

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 [...]

THE BLIND SIDE, THE HURT LOCKER Producer Credits

Quinton Aaron, Sandra Bullock in John Lee Hancock’s The Blind Side (top); Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie in Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker (bottom)

Producer credits for 82nd Academy Awards Best Picture nominees The Blind Side and The Hurt Locker have been determined by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Producers Branch Executive Committee. Credits are as follows:

The Blind Side – Gil Netter, Andrew A. Kosove and Broderick Johnson, producers.
The Hurt Locker – Kathryn Bigelow, Mark Boal, Nicolas Chartier and Greg Shapiro, producers.

As per the Academy’s press release, "Academy rules state that normally no more than three producers may be named as nominees in the Best Picture category. However, the rules [...]

Oscar 2010: Best Picture Nominees Box Office Grosses

James Cameron’s Avatar (top); Sandra Bullock, Tim McGraw in The Blind Side (middle); Carey Mulligan in An Education (bottom)

To shore up the Oscar ceremony’s dwindling television audience, the Academy wanted bigger fare at the 2010 Oscars. So, they expanded the Best Picture category to include ten films, hoping that some blockbuster or other would get a nomination.
Indeed, it’s true that several of the most commercially successful Oscar contenders listed below — Up, The Blind Side, District 9 — would probably not have made the cut had the Academy kept the Best Picture field restricted to five films. Avatar, of course, would have been shortlisted even if there had been only three slots available.
Last year, Christopher [...]

Oscar 2010: Preferential Voting System for Best Picture Winner

Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert in Frank Capra’s 1934 comedy It Happened One Night (top); Ray Milland, Jane Wyman in Billy Wilder’s 1945 drama The Lost Weekend (bottom). The first and last best picture Oscar winners by way of the preferential voting system.

The winner of the 2010 best picture Oscar will be determined through the preferential voting system, which in the last six or so decades has been used to determine the Academy Award nominees in most categories.
According to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences‘ press release, the preferential voting system will be used because it "is [the] one that best allows the collective judgment of all voting members to be most accurately represented." (In theory, perhaps. [...]