The Politics of Perception: Think Outside the Ballot Box

Nothing’s riding on this except the, uh, first amendment to the Constitution, freedom of the press, and maybe the future of the country.

What I’ve learned about the Oscar race from watching the 2012 election

There are many similarities between the Oscar race and the US presidential election. Pundits are generally divided up into teams, much like the Democrats and Republicans. The voters are bombarded with ads, charming persuaders, bloggers who try to tip the race in one direction or another because they believe in the best film winning. The critics and guild awards function like state by state polls. Various producers and publicists take informal polls that are sometimes right and sometimes wrong. Odds-makers predict how the race will turn out based on those factors.

Like an ill-informed electorate, many people vote for the Oscars without watching all of the movies. Just like most citizens vote without knowing all of the issues at stake. Winners are chosen on the basis of perception in both the Oscar race and in the election. That President Obama’s momentum could have shifted so dramatically after the first debate bears this out. What else but perception could have tipped the scales in the favor of the more dynamic candidate’s performance — which contained half-truths and flip-flops? It wasn’t a matter of substance, but a failure of optics. By the same token, how else do we explain movies that gain momentum and eventually win Best Picture yet have no staying power beyond the three months or so after the Oscars?

Although, in a significant way, the Oscar race is more honest than our presidential election because the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has worked hard for many years to curb lavish campaign spending. The guidelines greatly restrict direct access to Academy members and they frown upon the notion that bigger money wins the day. That safeguard was cast aside when our Supreme Court upheld the Citizens United decision, which states that funds to specific groups that aren’t directly made to the campaigns are protected as individual free speech, even if the identity of the individuals behind that organization remain anonymous. Worse, the Court claimed the government had no right to determine whether enormous expenditures might result in distortions of perception. Thus, there are currently no restrictions on how much a super-PAC can spend to influence voters, and often no way to find out where the money comes from.

You might not be familiar with the details of Citizens United but if you’re not, you should be. The legal architect behind Citizens United is James Bopp, Jr, a vehement abortion-rights foe for decades. To his mind, the only obstacle conservatives faced in pushing his anti-choice agenda through state referendums was the limit to how much cash could be thrown at it. Why should there be limits you might ask? Why should anyone care? Well, let’s look at another proposition in California last year where the tobacco lobby spent untold amounts of money in order to block a proposition that would tax cigarettes and funnel that money into cancer research. After a barrage of slick ads that smothered the voices of common sense, the proposal was easily defeated.

Though ordained by the SCOTUS, Citizens United is on trial in the court of public opinion during this presidential election. Both candidates are taking big donations from super PACs but the Republicans, because their candidate Mitt Romney supports massive tax cuts for the rich, have by far the larger donations by a handful of powerful people. Obama’s campaign, by contrast, must try to match those huge sums with many smaller donations from humbler groups and millions of ordinary citizens. That is a big difference because you are now looking at a scenario where one side funded by billionaires can potentially outspend the other and thus, buy an election.

Such is no longer the case in the Oscar race, though it used to be. It’s hard to believe but back when only Variety and the Hollywood Reporter advertised “For Your Consideration” campaigns, He Who Spent the Most usually won the race. That changed as the evolution of the race adapted to expanded access by new media: more critics, Oscar bloggers, more spread out advertising and of course, the Academy itself limiting campaigning. A splashy campaign can get you in the Oscar race — and really, it’s still one of the most important aspects of the Oscar race, but you can’t buy an Oscar win. Not anymore. You have to run a winner’s campaign still — you have to look like you have the money and the confidence to go for the big win (like The Artist last year) but if you’re outspent by another studio that doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t win. In fact, too much extravagance can sometimes work against you. One of the ugly rumors floating around during The Social Network vs. The King’s Speech was that Sony was outspending The Weinstein Co on Oscar ads. It wasn’t true, of course, but once the rumor got out it was reported as fact and you know, that funny thing about perception?

There is dirty politics in the Oscar race just like the presidential race, only not as many people care. So the trick with the Oscars is to float the old “whisper campaign” which puts some terrible idea out there that may sour perception. One famous whisper campaign involved spreading the impression that Saving Private Ryan was really “just about the first 45 minutes.” That mantra took the heat off of voters who really did like Shakespeare in Love better but thought they ought to vote for the bigger achievement, Saving Private Ryan. A similar tactic was tried this by the Romney campaign to remove the guilt voters felt for not voting Obama. Their ads were designed to relay out a patronizing message, “he’s not a bad guy. He tried and failed.”

I personally think a similar campaign was waged against Viola Davis most recently, the idea that Meryl Streep wouldn’t have many more chances to win but the younger Viola Davis would have plenty of chances ahead of her. Of course, the reality of the situation is exactly the opposite. Still, whisper campaigns are not like political ads — they aren’t out in the open, aren’t available for honest scrutiny, so it doesn’t matter whether they’re fact-based or fabricated. They are completely out of sight and take place at parties and during phone conversations.

Smear campaigns are also a popular strategy by film publicists in order to boost their own film’s potential to win by knocking out another. Most of the time this is done by publicists but occasionally bloggers get into the mix. Jeff Wells at Hollywood-Elsewhere is known for trying to “take down” Oscar contenders. Mo’Nique was one target, Eddie Murphy another, Spielberg’s Munich another and this year it’s The Central Park Five, Argo and Lincoln. But smear campaigns, like October surprises, mostly backfire; the more you criticize a film or an actor the more people want to rally to their defense. Thus, it’s sometimes a good strategy to plant a smear campaign close to final balloting so that voters rally even harder around your movie.

In politics, of course, smear campaigns are hourly occurrences. Very few of them are dramatic enough to affect the race simply because they happen with such frequency now. None of the attempt to derail Obama’s second term have worked. They don’t seem to work so well in the Oscar race either, which begs the question, why do people still try?

Probably because they fully believe that SOME people will believe them and if it’s a close race perhaps a few votes might make the difference.

Presidential candidates must say they want to win and they must say “vote for me.” Oscar contenders can’t come out and say “vote for me!” They can’t really run their own ads without risking ridicule, as Melissa Leo’s own FYC ads the year she was up for The Fighter confirm. But because she didn’t know you weren’t supposed to do that, and because the press made such a big deal about it, voters overcompensated anyway and gave her the easy win that year. It is a delicate high-wire act, campaigning for an Oscar. You do have to let it be known that you would like to win, as Kate Winslet and Meryl Streep both had to do, or you will always be politely shoved aside for another actor. You must come out and say it, though not act like you want it too badly, but then appear at every function possible to make sure voters get to talk to you, to keep liking you. Streep even appeared at the AARP last year, that’s how hard she was campaigning for the Oscar. Likewise, Viola Davis made many appearances too.

The presidential race is about likability. So are the Oscars. Votes are almost always about the person or film they “liked” best. So it doesn’t matter whether the film (or the president) will stand the test of time — it is about impulsive trust and the emotional tug of how voters feel Right Now. Sometimes you get lucky and pick a good one. Sometimes you don’t.

It comes down to a majority vote and voter turnout. Some years, in a really competitive Oscar year, a good deal of the 6,000 or so members of the Academy will remember to vote or get their ballots in on time. Voting in the Academy is a high honor, a privilege and it is viewed as such. Voting in America is also a privilege yet 40% of Americans don’t bother to show up at the polls. Most don’t vote because they don’t think it will make a difference, or because they are entitled and lazy, or because they don’t “get political.”

Predicting the US election is a lot easier than predicting the Oscars. Nate Silver at New York Times’ 538 is currently taking heat from delusional Republican columnists who not only want to attack plain facts but now attack his very solid math. But alas, Nate Silver could not predict the Oscars using the same model. The reason? There aren’t any kind of 100% reliable polling. Of course, some years are easier to predict (http://nymag.com/movies/features/54335/) than others. But no one has any formal strategy for polling Academy members. Moreover, you might poll them in January and they might change their minds by February. So you rely on precedents, proven patterns, and historical stats. And, as we know, stats can sometimes fail. For instance, no woman had ever won Best Director before Kathryn Bigelow did. That was a broken precedent. All indications that Jason Reitman would win Best Adapted Screenplay for Up in the Air were in place: he’d won everything leading up to the race. But Geoffrey Fletcher won instead, completely breaking with tradition and making Academy history as Fletcher became, unbelievably, the first black screenwriter to win.

Rob Marshall won Best Director for Chicago at the DGAs. There was very little indication at all that Roman Polanski’s The Pianist was gaining momentum. The only small clue was its performance at the BAFTAs, where it famously won Best Picture and Best Director. The Pianist was the better film, but Chicago was the more popular film, the moneymaker. That’s a situation where stats won’t help you at all. But such unpredictable moments rarely happen in the political elections because the polls have proven mostly reliable. Nate Silver gives odds of probability. But he’s too smart to ever give a 100% prediction. He goes with “most likely.” And for that the conservatives have lost their minds. I’m sure they figure God will help Mitt Romney win, so how to quantify God’s Will?

The Oscar race means very little in the grand scheme of things. The same can not be said for the presidential election. It means everything that Americans feel involved in democracy. Ours is a government for the people and by the people, therefore the only power you really have is your vote. The two competing ideologies in this year’s election are dramatically different. The Democrats are about “we’re all in this together.” President Obama’s administration has tried to dismantle the corporate control of our government but it’s still very much under control of the very rich. He is making a lot of billionaires mad with his Affordable Care Act and removing the banks from the student loan process, for instance. The Right want to preserve the power structure of the very rich and remove what they call “entitlement programs,” like Medicare, Medicaid, FEMA and PBS. This is being sold as a way lower taxes on the middle class and improve the economy. But the real tax cut jackpot is reserved for the super rich. So of course, all it really does is keep powerful people on top and the poorer populations on the bottom.

This is my biased opinion on the presidential race. I’m sure you would get a much different description from the Right. My bias comes into place during the Oscar race because I think it’s important for all of us to express our personal convictions through any means at our disposal. Maybe I can’t fund a Super PAC to saturate the airwaves, but if this site can help persuade a few readers to understand my point of view, then it’s another grain of sand to help outweigh the rock piles of billionaires.

The point here is that if you live in the United States you have no excuse not to register and get out to vote. Don’t blow it. The same goes for Directors Guild, Producers Guild, Screen Actors Guild and Academy members. You have the honor of defining the year’s best in film. Don’t blow it.