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    Harvey Weinstein Indecent Assault Case Dropped by U.K. Prosecutors

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    The Crown Prosecution Service said that it had “decided that there is no longer a realistic prospect of conviction.”British prosecutors have dropped a case against Harvey Weinstein, the disgraced movie mogul, just two years after authorizing indecent assault charges against him.In a statement on Thursday, the Crown Prosecution Service said that, “following a review of the evidence,” it had decided to halt the proceedings against Mr. Weinstein.Frank Ferguson, head of the service’s special crime and counterterrorism division, said in the statement that there was “no longer a realistic prospect of conviction.”“We have explained our decision to all parties,” he added.On Thursday, a spokeswoman for the Crown Prosecution Service said in an email that the service would not be giving any further details of the reasoning behind the decision.The case dates to 2022, when British prosecutors authorized two charges against Mr. Weinstein of indecent assault of a woman in London in 1996. Under British law, it is illegal to identify potential victims of sexual assault, even after prosecutors drop a case.At the height of his powers, Mr. Weinstein, now 72, was one of the world’s most important movie producers, widely seen as able to make or break an actor’s career.In 2017, his career went into free fall after The New York Times reported that he had, over the course of nearly three decades, paid off women who had accused him of sexual assault. In the story’s aftermath, prosecutors mounted cases against him in both Britain and the United States.Last year, Mr. Weinstein was sentenced to 16 years in prison after being convicted of rape and sexual assault in California.In April, New York’s highest court overturned Mr. Weinstein’s 2020 felony sex crimes conviction, ruling that the original judge had deprived him of a fair trial. The court said that the original judge should not have let prosecutors call witnesses who said that Mr. Weinstein had assaulted them when their accusations did not form part of the case.In May, Manhattan prosecutors announced they would retry Mr. Weinstein on sex crimes charges and he is currently in the Rikers Island jail complex awaiting that case. More

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      Marlon Wayans on ‘Good Grief’ and the Death of His Parents

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      It’s not easy to build a long and lucrative career by making comedy that some people might be tempted to call silly or sophomoric. If it were, more comedians would be as successful as Marlon Wayans. Wayans, the youngest sibling in a family dynasty that also includes his brothers Damon, Shawn and Keenen Ivory Wayans and his sister Kim Wayans, has over the course of his 30-plus-year career scored in nearly every format. He has starred in broad sitcoms (the WB’s “The Wayans Bros.”), irreverent sketch comedy (“In Living Color”) and slapstick movies (“White Chicks”; the first two installments in the “Scary Movie” franchise), and released three, let’s say, Rabelaisian standup specials. His newest effort in that realm, “Good Grief,” will premiere on Amazon Prime Video on June 4.Listen to the Conversation With Marlon WayansThe comedian talks to David Marchese on becoming a different person after the death of his parents.In that special, Wayans, who has also carved out an impressive sideline as a supporting dramatic actor in films, is branching out by using comedy to work through some seriously heavy emotions. “Good Grief” is all about the death of his parents as well as the nearly 60 other loved ones he has lost in recent years.When I talked with Wayans, he was in Albuquerque, where he was filming a psychological horror movie for Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw production company — and, ahead of the first of our two conversations, getting ready to host a party for the cast and crew.Since you’re having a party tonight, it seems perfectly natural to talk about the subject of your new special: the death of your parents. Isn’t that crazy? Other people are like, What’s your next special? “Oh, it’s a funny journey about the death of my parents.” But it wasn’t just the death of my parents. I lost 58 people that I loved in a matter of three years. It felt, like, biblical.How do you find the funny thing in the sad thing? It’s been a gift since I was a kid. I mean, all of us Wayanses, we’re crazy people. The worst thing happens, and the first thing we’d think is What’s funny about it? I remember when my cousin Ceddy died and my auntie buried him in jeans and a T-shirt and some Air Force 1s and a baseball cap. Damon looks and goes, “If there’s a dress code in heaven, I don’t think Ceddy’s getting in.” More

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      The Harvey Weinstein Appeal Ruling: Annotated and Explained

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      The 2020 conviction of Harvey Weinstein on felony sex crime charges in Manhattan was overturned on Thursday by New York’s top court. The ruling by the New York Court of Appeals said the trial judge in Mr. Weinstein’s case, Justice James M. Burke, erred in letting prosecutors call some women as witnesses who said Mr. […] More

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      Lawsuit Claims James Dolan Pressured Woman Into Sex

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      In the court filing, the woman also says Harvey Weinstein sexually assaulted her in a 2014 encounter that she believes was set up by Mr. Dolan. Both men denied her accusations.A woman filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday accusing James L. Dolan, the entertainment and sports mogul behind Madison Square Garden and the New York Knicks, of pressuring her into unwanted sex and then coordinating an encounter with Harvey Weinstein, whom she accused of sexually assaulting her.The woman, Kellye Croft, says in the court filing that she told Mr. Dolan — a former friend and business associate of Mr. Weinstein’s — about the alleged incident after it occurred in early 2014, years before Mr. Dolan made public statements that he had been unaware of Mr. Weinstein’s history of misconduct.In her suit, filed in Federal District Court in Los Angeles, Ms. Croft says that in late 2013, when she was 27, she was hired to work as a massage therapist on a tour by the classic rock band Eagles. Mr. Dolan — who moonlights as a blues-rock musician — was an opening act with his band JD & the Straight Shot.In court papers, Ms. Croft describes the experience as a dream gig that went awry because of the misconduct of two men who were among the most powerful figures in media and entertainment. First, Ms. Croft’s suit says, she was pressured into unwanted sex with Mr. Dolan, and then found herself alone in a Beverly Hills hotel room with Mr. Weinstein, who chased her down a hallway, held her down and penetrated her against her will.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      John Bailey, Oscars President at a Time of Strife, Dies at 81

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      A respected cinematographer, he guided the motion picture academy at the height of the #MeToo movement and dealt with infighting around the Oscar ceremony.John Bailey, an accomplished cinematographer who was president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences from 2017 to 2019, a tumultuous period when Harvey Weinstein was excommunicated from the group and complaints mounted about the Academy Awards ceremony, died on Friday. He was 81.His death was announced by the academy, which did not say where he died or specify the cause.As a cinematographer, Mr. Bailey collaborated frequently with celebrated directors like Paul Schrader and worked on many well-known movies, including “Groundhog Day” (1993) and “The Big Chill” (1983).Before he was chosen to head the academy, he had never held a prominent public role, and he was never nominated for an Oscar himself, though he helped others win the award. In an interview in 2020 with the publication American Cinematographer, Mr. Bailey said he generally tried to make his own work “invisible.”After the academy announced in August 2017 that he would be its next president, The New York Times reported: “Hollywood scratched its head. Who?”It took only two months for Mr. Bailey to find himself in the news. Shortly after The Times and The New Yorker published investigations revealing previously undisclosed allegations of sexual harassment against the producer Harvey Weinstein, the academy voted overwhelmingly to “immediately expel” him. It was only the second known instance of an expulsion from the academy.(The first happened in 2004, when the character actor Carmine Caridi had his membership revoked after he broke rules about lending DVD screeners of contending films. Since then, the comedian and actor Bill Cosby, the director Roman Polanski and the cinematographer Adam Kimmel have also been expelled.)In a letter Mr. Bailey sent to members of the academy days after the vote, he wrote that the organization could not become “an inquisitorial court.” But he also expressed passionate support for the decision.“We are witnessing this venerable motion picture academy reinvent itself before our very eyes,” Mr. Bailey said to a luncheon of Oscar nominees several months later, according to Vanity Fair. “I may be a 75-year-old white male, but I’m every bit as gratified as the youngest of you here that the fossilized bedrock of many of Hollywood’s worst abuses are being jackhammered into oblivion.”In the kind of head-spinning turn of events that became familiar during the height of the #MeToo moment, Mr. Bailey himself became the subject of a sexual harassment accusation only weeks later.Variety reported that the academy had received three harassment complaints about Mr. Bailey. But the academy later announced that it had only one such accusation to look into, and within weeks it determined that there was no merit to the claim.More turmoil for Mr. Bailey’s academy lay ahead. The 2018 Oscars telecast saw a drop-off in ratings that has never been fully reversed. The comedian Kevin Hart was hired to host the 2019 ceremony, then stepped down amid criticism of jokes he had made years earlier about not wanting his son to be gay, leaving that year’s event hostless.Mr. Bailey made the case for two changes to the ceremony designed to maintain viewer interest in a new era: adding a “popular film” category, to include the kind of blockbuster movies that the Oscars otherwise overlook, and holding some award announcements during commercial breaks to shorten the broadcast. The academy encountered such severe blowback to those proposals that it scrapped both of them.In 2019, when term limits compelled Mr. Bailey to step down from his position, The Times described his tenure as “chaotic,” but in hindsight, perhaps none of the scandals of Mr. Bailey’s era rose to the level of Will Smith giving Chris Rock an unscripted slap to the face midbroadcast. (Mr. Smith received a ban of 10 years from the Oscars.)Getting embroiled in culture wars and power struggles was an unexpected career development for Mr. Bailey. He made it his modus operandi, he told American Cinematographer, to avoid “tawdry” films. Describing his youthful aspirations in a 2017 interview with The New York Times, Mr. Bailey said, referring to a long-dead French film critic, “I wanted to write — to be the American André Bazin.”Mr. Bailey in 1983 with the director Lawrence Kasdan on the set of “The Big Chill.”Columbia Pictures, via Everett CollectionJohn Ira Bailey was born on Aug. 10, 1942, in Moberly, Mo. He grew up in Norwalk, a city in Los Angeles County, California. He told American Cinematographer that his father was a machinist who never went to high school.He earned a bachelor’s degree from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles in 1964, and several years later he earned a graduate degree in cinema from the University of Southern California. He entered that program to pursue film studies, a young cinephile hoping to become a critic, but found himself drawn instead to cinematography.Early in his career, he had small jobs on several enduring films, like being the camera operator on Mr. Malick’s “Days of Heaven.” The beauty of Néstor Almendros’s cinematography in that movie remained an inspiration for Mr. Bailey.When Mr. Schrader was preparing to shoot “American Gigolo” (1980), he planned to find a European cinematographer. But then, American Cinematographer reported, he was introduced to Mr. Bailey, found himself impressed by Mr. Bailey’s knowledge of foreign film and decided to hire him instead. The two men would go on to work together on five movies.That same year, Mr. Bailey worked with Robert Redford on “Ordinary People,” Mr. Redford’s directorial debut, which won several Oscars, including for best director.In later years Mr. Bailey repeatedly collaborated with the directors Michael Apted (on the 1996 movie “Extreme Measures” and other films) and Ken Kwapis (on films including “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants” in 2005 and “He’s Just Not That Into You” in 2009). He also wrote a blog about film for American Cinematographer.His accomplishments at the academy included expanding international membership, which he told The Times helped the South Korean film “Parasite” win the best-picture award in 2020.He is survived by his wife of 51 years, Carol Littleton, an Oscar-nominated film editor.At the 2018 luncheon for Oscar nominees, Mr. Bailey had some useful advice for winners, The Times reported.“Thank your mom,” he said, “not your personal trainer.” More

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      Actress Julia Ormond Accuses Harvey Weinstein of Battery in Lawsuit

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      Ms. Ormond also sued Creative Artists Agency, which represented her at the time, and Disney, which owned Mr. Weinstein’s Miramax.The actress Julia Ormond, known for “Legends of the Fall” and “Sabrina,” accused Harvey Weinstein of sexual battery in a lawsuit filed on Wednesday in a New York court, claiming that the former film producer forced her to give him oral sex during a business meeting in 1995.Ms. Ormond also sued Creative Artists Agency, which represented her at the time, saying in the complaint that two of its senior agents cautioned her from speaking out — and informed her of the “going rate” for settlements paid to women who accused Mr. Weinstein of sex crimes. She said the sum was $100,000.Mr. Weinstein, now 71, was convicted in 2020 by a New York jury on charges of rape and criminal sexual assault and sentenced to 23 years in prison. He was later convicted of similar crimes in Los Angeles and sentenced to 16 years, to be served after his New York term. Mr. Weinstein has denied the claims against him, saying all encounters were consensual, and is appealing both convictions.“Harvey Weinstein categorically denies the allegations made against him by Julia Ormond, and he is prepared to vehemently defend himself,” Imran H. Ansari, a lawyer for Mr. Weinstein, said in a statement. Mr. Ansari added that her lawsuit was “yet another example of a complaint filed against Mr. Weinstein after the passing of decades.”CAA did not respond to requests for comment. Lawyers for Ms. Ormond said her complaint was the first to sue the powerful agency for what the suit claims was its role in covering up and enabling Mr. Weinstein’s behavior.Ms. Ormond’s complaint, filed in New York Supreme Court, also named the Walt Disney Company and Miramax, which Disney owned from 1993 to 2010. Ms. Ormond claimed the companies also knew about Mr. Weinstein’s predation and failed to protect her from him.Disney declined to comment. Miramax, now owned in part by Paramount Global, did not respond to requests for comment.According to the complaint, CAA secured a two-year production deal between Ms. Ormond and Miramax. She claims that Mr. Weinstein sexually assaulted her in 1995 after a business dinner. According to the suit, Mr. Weinstein said he would discuss a project she was interested in only at the apartment that Miramax had provided for Ms. Ormond as part of her deal.At the apartment, the suit said, Mr. Weinstein stripped naked and forced Ms. Ormond to give him oral sex.Afterward, Ms. Ormond told her agents, Bryan Lourd, now the chief executive of CAA, and Kevin Huvane, now a co-chairman of the agency, about what had occurred, according to the complaint.“Rather than take Ormond’s side and advocate for her interest, they suggested that if she reported Weinstein to the authorities, she would not be believed, and he would seriously damage her career,” the complaint said.Ms. Ormond did not pursue further action, the complaint said, but Mr. Weinstein terminated her contract at Miramax. CAA also transferred her to a younger, less experienced agent, diminishing her career potential, the lawsuit said.In a statement, Ms. Ormond said her lawsuit was a “way to shed light on how powerful people and institutions like my talent agents at CAA, Miramax and Disney enabled and provided cover for Weinstein to assault me and countless others.” More

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      Inside the ‘Blood Sport’ of Oscars Campaigns

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      Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.Depending on how closely you’ve been following the Oscars race this year, you may or may not know the name Andrea Riseborough. Before Jan. 24, few outside of the film industry did. An actress from northeastern England, Riseborough began her career in​ theater and has worked steadily since. At 41, she has appeared in more than 30 films, including “Birdman,” “Battle of the Sexes” and “The Death of Stalin.” People like to say that the only reason she isn’t famous is that she inhabits roles so completely, she becomes unrecognizable. But on Tuesday, Jan. 24, Riseborough was nominated for a best-actress Oscar alongside Cate Blanchett, Michelle Williams, Ana de Armas and Michelle Yeoh. No one predicted Riseborough’s nomination. She did not appear on pundits’ shortlists. There were no profiles of her in glossy magazines. “To Leslie,” the film about an alcoholic West Texas lottery winner for which she was nominated, had earned just $27,322 at the box office.Within 24 hours, the reaction to Riseborough’s nomination went from surprise to scrutiny to backlash. It turned out that a small army of movie stars had championed Riseborough. Charlize Theron, Jennifer Aniston, Sarah Paulson and Gwyneth Paltrow hosted screenings. Others praised Riseborough’s performance on social media and beyond, including Edward Norton, Susan Sarandon, Helen Hunt, Patricia Clarkson, Pedro Pascal, Demi Moore, Jamie Lee Curtis, Bradley Whitford, Jane Fonda, Mia Farrow, Kate Winslet, Alan Cumming, Rosanna Arquette and even Blanchett. The campaign was described as organic and grass roots, but some celebrities had posted suspiciously identical language, describing “To Leslie” as “a small film with a giant heart.” That Viola Davis (“The Woman King”) and Danielle Deadwyler (“Till”) were not nominated despite predictions to the contrary made it look as if a bunch of actors campaigned on behalf of a white actress, leading to the exclusion of Black actresses.Andrea Riseborough in “To Leslie.”Momentum PicturesThe Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Oscars’ governing body, opened an investigation. Oscar campaign regulations forbid direct lobbying, and it turned out that some of Riseborough’s supporters, including Mary McCormack, who is married to Michael Morris, the director of “To Leslie,” had encouraged academy members to watch the film and publicly endorse Riseborough’s performance. Cynthia Swartz, an awards strategist working on films including “Tár,” “Elvis,” “Women Talking,” “Till” and “Avatar: The Way of Water,” told me the campaign inspired her to look up the definition of lobbying, which is not comprehensively defined in the academy’s campaign regulations. “I don’t believe academy members should be posting about how they’re going to vote,” Swartz said, “or urging others to vote in a certain way.” Tony Angellotti, a consultant on “The Fabelmans,” put it less mildly. “There are very specific rules about direct outreach,” he said. “Clearly, here, those rules were broken.” Neither the director nor his wife are members of the academy. But consultants I spoke to said it didn’t matter. A couple joked that it was a little like the Jan. 6 insurrection: President Donald Trump may not have personally stormed the Capitol, but he encouraged others to do so.In February, the academy announced that Riseborough’s nomination would stand, promising to clarify its regulations after the awards. But the controversy reminded everyone of the reality of the Oscars: that despite the big show of sealed envelopes being delivered via handcuffed briefcases, the votes — in Hollywood as in Washington, D.C. — are a result of a highly contingent, political process, handed down not from movie gods but from the very people who stand to benefit from it. “To say that Andrea Riseborough took a nomination away from Viola and Danielle, you cannot have this conversation without having the whole conversation,” said a campaign strategist with a film in the race. “You have to look at: ‘OK, well, what money was spent on the other campaigns? And who’s spending it?’ This is just the tip of the iceberg.”Oscar campaigns are often run by professional strategists, essentially a specialized breed of publicist. Their job begins as early as a year before the awards, sometimes before a film is even shot. They advise on which festival a film should premiere at, shape a campaign platform and hope that the film gains enough momentum to propel it into awards season. Sometimes several strategists work on a single film, and the war room of an Oscars campaign can grow to be as many as 10 or 20 people. All the stops along the campaign trail — screenings, events, other award shows — are an opportunity to workshop talking points and gauge the competition. And unlike the Golden Globes, which are voted on by 199 entertainment journalists, the Oscars electorate is a voting body of about 10,000 industry peers, which is nearly double what it was before the #OscarsSoWhite controversy that began in 2015.The Oscars race is split into Phases 1 and 2: before and after the nominations, which is akin to the divide between the presidential primaries and the general election. “Phase 2 is all about honing your narrative and defining yourself in the race,” Lea Yardum, who is working with a couple best-picture nominees this year, told me. “Some narratives form themselves but others are — I don’t want to say crafted by us, but they form themselves and we amplify them.”Think about everything you know about this year’s Oscar nominees and, chances are, it was proliferated by an awards consultant. “Top Gun: Maverick” saved the movie business with its nearly $1.5 billion at the box office. “Everything Everywhere All at Once” is the exuberant sci-fi romp that created some much-needed opportunities for Asian American actors. “All Quiet on the Western Front” is the biggest antiwar film ever (despite still technically being a war film). Vote for “The Fabelmans” if you love Spielberg and the movies and “Tár” if you want to go with the unanimous critics’ pick.“Every year, everyone goes into a campaign armed with statistics — oh, the statistics!” Yardum told me. An Asian actress has never been up for an Oscar, so vote for Michelle Yeoh: It’s her time. Did you know Jamie Lee Curtis has never been nominated? She’s due. Spielberg hasn’t won a best picture Oscar since 1994. Is it helpful to know what gas prices were the last time he won? (A strategist has that handy: $1.11 a gallon!) Narratives don’t always work, but a good narrative can triumph over a bad movie. Just consider the moving comeback of Brendan Fraser, who was nominated for his performance in “The Whale,” a movie that was panned by critics.Negative narratives are usually attributed to the diabolical workings of rival strategists: the stories about abusive directors, overblown budgets, whether the real people behind biopics should really be celebrated. (See: “A Beautiful Mind.”) “They try to change someone else’s narrative by adding dirt to the layer,” Angellotti told me, citing the old rumor that Matt Damon and Ben Affleck didn’t really write “Good Will Hunting.” A more recent example that strategists still talk about is when “Green Book” was up for best picture in 2019. The week the nomination ballots went out, a story resurfaced about the director of the movie, Peter Farrelly, and a joke he used to play 20 years earlier that involved exposing himself. (Farrelly apologized the same day.) The film still won, but many believe another best-picture campaign planted the story.The Run-Up to the 2023 OscarsThe 95th Academy Awards will be presented on March 12 in Los Angeles.Asian Actors: A record number of actors of Asian ancestry were recognized with Oscar nominations this year. But historically, Asian stars have rarely been part of the awards.Hong Chau Interview: In a conversation with The Times, the actress, who is nominated for her supporting role in “The Whale,” says she still feels like an underdog.Andrea Riseborough Controversy: Confused about the brouhaha surrounding the best actress nominee? We explain why the “To Leslie” star’s nod was controversial.The Making of ‘Naatu Naatu’: The composers and choreographer from the Indian blockbuster “RRR” explain how they created the propulsive sequence that is nominated for best song.Everyone in the industry insists that negative campaigning has become less prevalent than it used to be. And yet when a veteran strategist with a client in the race told me how opportunistic it was for the “Everything Everywhere All at Once” cast to visit the site of the Monterey Park shooting on the eve of the nomination announcements, I’m pretty sure I got to experience it firsthand. “Do they not know the shooter is Asian?” the strategist asked. “It’s not a racially motivated crime.”For those paying attention to this year’s narratives, it was not a mystery where the backlash to Riseborough’s nomination was coming from; or the backlash to the backlash, articulated by Christina Ricci (represented by the same public-relations firm as Riseborough) in a now-deleted Instagram post. “Seems hilarious that the ‘surprise nomination’ (meaning tons of money wasn’t spent to position this actress) of a legitimately brilliant performance is being met with an investigation,” Ricci wrote. “So it’s only the films and actors that can afford the campaigns that deserve recognition?” Suddenly, being backed by a studio had become a negative narrative of its own. Many awards consultants spoke to me on the condition of anonymity because they didn’t want to face repercussions from their studio bosses. Others didn’t want to be seen as taking credit. “We prefer to be invisible,” a strategist working on several films this year told me. And yet here they were, seemingly sparring out in the open.Oscars campaigning has been around as long as there have been Oscars, but the modern playbook was invented by Harvey Weinstein at Miramax in the late 1980s and early ’90s. Weinstein popularized the practice of sending out VHS screeners, demanded that actors clear their schedules for awards season and relentlessly lobbied academy members. Studios generally held their noses at aggressive campaigning, but Weinstein, unable to compete with their budgets, wasn’t above a shameless publicity stunt.For “My Left Foot,” one of his first Oscar campaigns, he got Daniel Day-Lewis to go to Capitol Hill to speak with lawmakers about the Americans With Disabilities Act. For “Il Postino,” a 1994 Italian-language film about a mailman who befriends the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, he persuaded more than a dozen celebrities, including Julia Roberts, Samuel L. Jackson and Madonna — none of whom appeared in the film — to record poetry readings for the film’s soundtrack. “The thing that’s horrible when you think about it is Harvey was really persistent,” said Cynthia Swartz, who helped run Miramax’s awards campaigns for more than 10 years. “He wouldn’t take no for an answer from a celebrity to do a poetry reading or wear a Marchesa dress. Knowing what we know now, it’s chilling and frankly scary to think how far that that behavior extended. He was always asking celebrities for things and being extremely aggressive about it.”.css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}What we consider before using anonymous sources. Do the sources know the information? What’s their motivation for telling us? Have they proved reliable in the past? Can we corroborate the information? Even with these questions satisfied, The Times uses anonymous sources as a last resort. The reporter and at least one editor know the identity of the source.Learn more about our process.Weinstein was widely rumored to wage whisper campaigns against his competitors. The last time Spielberg won a best-director Oscar was in 1999 for “Saving Private Ryan,” which lost an epic behind-the-scenes battle for best picture to Miramax’s “Shakespeare in Love.” “For Harvey, campaigning was a blood sport, and I don’t think it had ever been a blood sport before,” Terry Press, who was then Spielberg’s head of marketing at DreamWorks, told me. “Everybody wants to win. But Harvey wanted to win and kill everything else.” Many of the top consultants working today came out of the Miramax school, including Swartz, Angellotti and Lisa Taback, who went in-house at Netflix in 2018.‘Everybody hates Harvey, and he’s in jail, and he should be. He’s a criminal and he raped people. But people liked his results, and they still want them.’A number of regulations that the academy has issued since then to police campaigning have been in response to tactics pioneered by Weinstein. Today campaigners can reach out to academy voters only via approved mailing houses, and only once a week, and if a reception accompanies a screening it may only provide “nonexcessive food and beverage.” In Phase 2, no food or drink is allowed at all, including water. “I think the academy is full of it sometimes with this stuff,” a strategist with several films in the race told me. “You know, people have jobs. If you want them to see a movie at 7 p.m., and they’re coming from work, give them some popcorn and a water, my God! What are you trying to prove? I’m of the opinion that you could buy someone the most expensive lobster dinner and it is not going to change the way they vote. The only thing it might do is entice them to come see the movie — maybe.”The campaign industry that exists today has grown with and around the rules. With mailed screeners no longer permitted, films are typically uploaded to the academy’s online screening room at a cost of $20,000. Because campaigners can’t contact academy members directly, they try to reach them other ways, such as with $90,000 cover ads in the trades and paid email blasts through the guilds. Then there are the endless screenings, live score performances, dinners, trade round tables, precursor awards and special magazine issues — this publication also does one — all a part of a symbiotic ecosystem that is fed by the awards business.Once streaming platforms entered the arena and the best-picture category grew to 10 films, the campaign business expanded. Whereas a major studio might spend anywhere from $5 million to $25 million on an Oscars campaign, Netflix was estimated to deploy upward of $40 million on “Roma” in 2019, more than double the film’s production budget. The following year, Netflix spent a reported $70 million on its Oscar campaigns, which included “Marriage Story” and “The Irishman.” (A Netflix representative described those estimates as inaccurate.) Sometimes campaign spending has less to do with securing nominations than awards-hungry talent. “When there’s a race for the biggest names in the business, part of that is, ‘How are you going to support my film?’” an awards consultant told me. All of this is further reinforced by financial incentives. A nomination means that an actor’s or director’s fee goes up considerably. And the awards consultants who deliver those nominations get bonuses: upward of $25,000 for a best-picture nomination; another $50,000 for a win.“Winning awards has become the guiding principle of our industry, and it’s what’s destroying it,” Amanda Lundberg, the chief executive of 42West, which is working on the “Top Gun: Maverick” campaign, told me. (The publicity firm also consulted on “To Leslie” until December, when another firm took it over.) “It’s gotten to a place where every single filmmaker thinks their movie is an award contender.” Last year, Lundberg had a meeting with a filmmaker who wanted to discuss a best-picture campaign but hadn’t yet shown Lundberg the actual film. “It’s like we’re award fetchers,” she said. “Like you can just order that with me as if I’m 1-800-Oscar.”Lundberg worked for Miramax, starting in 1988 and again beginning in 2002. Despite all the new academy regulations, Lundberg believes the appetite for Weinstein’s tactics is as insatiable as ever. “Here’s the thing,” she said. “Everybody hates Harvey, and he’s in jail, and he should be. He’s a criminal and he raped people. But people liked his results, and they still want them.” Lundberg continued: “People are desperate to win awards. And we’ve guided it here because we’ve rewarded it with money and prestige. So what happens when people want something that’s limited? Do the math. It causes all sorts of behavior, and people lose where the line is.”Riseborough may not have secured her nomination if it weren’t for the complex math behind how nominations are tabulated. In Phase 2, Oscar winners are voted on by the entire academy. But in Phase 1, with the exception of best picture, they’re selected by their peers — i.e., actors nominate actors, directors nominate directors and so on. Members of the acting branch list their top five choices in order of preference, but not all of them vote. In other words, you don’t need the whole academy to like you; only actors, and only a small fraction of them.Much of the criticism leveled at the Riseborough campaign has been about how strategic it seemed despite being described as organic. McCormack encouraged her social circle to post about the film daily, a directive that the actress Frances Fisher — she played Kate Winslet’s mother in “Titanic” — seemingly took to heart. She posted about Riseborough almost every day during the week of nominations voting. “Hello actors branch of the academy!” Fisher wrote on Instagram, addressing the voters directly. In another post, Fisher broke down the math of just how few of their votes it would take to get Riseborough nominated, citing a story in Deadline Hollywood: “#AndreaRiseborough can secure an #Oscar nomination if 218 (out 1,302) actors in the Actors Branch nominate her in 1st position for #BestActress.” (The academy disputes the accuracy of those numbers; Fisher declined to comment.) And though campaign regulations forbid mentioning competitors by name, Fisher urged the acting branch to choose Riseborough, because it “seems to be that Viola, Michelle, Danielle & Cate are a lock for their outstanding work.”A best-actress campaign can run to $5 million. There is no question that the distributor of “To Leslie,” Momentum Pictures, did not spend that. The movie itself was made for less, and Riseborough and Michael Morris helped pay for the campaign themselves. Still, P.R. firms were hired. A social-media campaign was organized. And several people worked their phones to drum up support, including McCormack and McCormack’s and Riseborough’s manager, Jason Weinberg, whose roster of clients includes some of the movie stars who endorsed the actress. “Hand-to-hand combat,” as this style of campaigning is known, is not unheard of. Everybody does it, consultants told me, but they’re usually less overt about it. “You know, it wasn’t just, ‘We’re the little engine that could,’” a seasoned strategist with a few clients in the race told me. “It was more than that.”The thing with actors is they tend to like a certain kind of performance — big, physical and full of interesting “choices,” all of which Riseborough’s is. (Kate Winslet called it the greatest performance by a female actor she had ever seen.) The actors who campaigned for Riseborough probably believed they were simply championing an overlooked and worthy performer. Is it possible that some didn’t know they were violating regulations? Of course it’s possible. Have you seen what happens when actors come together for a cause? It can be clueless, but it is usually well intentioned. (See Gal Gadot’s “Imagine” video from the early days of the pandemic.) But in the process, they circumvented the vast Oscar machinery that has arisen since those early Miramax days.The academy’s regulations are a bit like the Talmud: maddeningly specific in certain places — mailings about a film may include only “an unembellished, creditless synopsis” — and vague in others. There’s even a clause that basically says, Mind the spirit of these rules, as they apply to things we haven’t even thought of yet. Every year campaign strategists call the academy, asking if certain things are OK, such as menus and party invitations. If anyone with a good Rolodex could bypass this system, then what is the point of the Oscar consultants hired to navigate it?But it also seemed to open a larger question of who the true underdog is in an Oscars race. Is it the actress without a studio or millions of dollars behind her, or the one with studio support and fewer connections? Gina Prince-Bythewood, the director of “The Woman King,” a blockbuster released by Sony, argued the latter in The Hollywood Reporter, addressing Riseborough’s nomination directly. “My issue with what happened is how people in the industry use their social capital,” she said, adding, “people say, ‘Well, Viola and Danielle had studios behind them.’ But we just very clearly saw that social capital is more valuable.” Perhaps, but surely starring in a $50 million critically acclaimed studio film is valuable too and is the entire reason that those working in obscurity make a play for an Oscar. At the end of the day, the campaign game is about finding the most compelling narrative, one that inspires people to root for you.The academy most likely upheld Riseborough’s nomination because she didn’t personally violate campaign rules. But few expected the ruling to go any other way. Penalizing those involved with the campaign would mean a move against Hollywood’s biggest names, whom the academy needs to star in their movies and show up to the awards. “This town doesn’t move without actors,” one veteran strategist told me. “If they came down on this campaign, well, that’s an indictment of Charlize Theron, Kate Winslet, Edward Norton. But the truth is, if I did it, I would be in academy jail.”It is worth remembering that the Academy Awards were created as a marketing device to entice people to see movies and, like football, used to air on Monday nights to boost ratings. “This is not the Nobel Peace Prize,” Lundberg told me. That doesn’t necessarily stop some Oscar winners from acting as if it is. At best, a nomination can extend the theatrical release of a film and drive more people to watch it long after it has left theaters. But it is just that: an ad created by a professional organization to sell you on movies even if — and especially as — their quality is in evident decline. “Every year, everyone talks about what a magnificent year this has been for movies,” Angellotti told me, “and the public is going, ‘Really?’”Many of the films nominated this year are a product of the Covid years. Spielberg wouldn’t have made “The Fabelmans” if he wasn’t stuck at home, contemplating mortality and wondering which stories he hadn’t told yet. (The answer turned out to be his own.) “Everything Everywhere All at Once” had to shut down production early and film Yeoh over Zoom, which is also how Blanchett learned to conduct for “Tár.” “The Banshees of Inisherin,” filmed on remote islands with a small cast, was an especially pandemic-friendly production. Movie theaters, meanwhile, have closed faster than audiences could keep track of, and 2022 box-office numbers fell short of the year’s meager predictions. (Theatrical attendance has shrunk by half in the last four years.) All of this is a reason to ask just how much Oscars drama, this year or any other, is manufactured by the very people whose job it is to get us to watch. The Riseborough controversy, though unpleasant for those involved, has ultimately led to many more people seeing “To Leslie.” (Momentum Pictures re-released the film in select theaters.)Looking ahead, some wondered if the only way to save the movie business from itself is to go back to the innocent pre-Miramax days of more restrained Oscar campaigns. If running a rule-abiding campaign can’t be done without millions of dollars, then the next logical step would be addressing those inequities. But instituting spending caps is a nonstarter, as it would mean big losses for the trades, screening rooms, caterers, consultants, stylists and any other entity that benefits from awards business. “Who’s going to call The New York Times and The Hollywood Reporter and say we can’t take out ads anymore?” Angellotti said. “That’s called restriction of trade. I don’t see it as a viable situation.” Not to mention that many Oscar strategists are themselves voting members of the Marketing and Public Relations branch of the academy.This year, Terry Press is once again working with Spielberg, who has a well-documented aversion to Oscar campaigning. She admitted that spending limits were an intriguing if unrealistic idea. “I’m cutting off my nose to spite my face here,” she said, “but I would love to see somebody go all the way and spend nothing on any of this.“Because then,” she added, “it’s really going to be about the movie.”Irina Aleksander is a contributing writer for the magazine. Her last feature article was about Kirill Serebrennikov, a Russian filmmaker navigating widespread calls for a boycott of Russian culture. Javier Jaén is an illustrator and a designer based in Barcelona, Spain. He is known for his translation of complex ideas into simple images, often with a playful tone. More

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      Two Histories of the Scandal-Soaked Academy Awards

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      On the eve of Hollywood’s big, if diminished, night, two deeply researched books dig into the scandal-soaked history of the Academy Awards.Are the Oscars history?What else to conclude from the recent publication of two erudite if waggish books about this somewhat deflated annual pageant: Michael Schulman’s OSCAR WARS: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears (Harper, 589 pp., $40) and Bruce Davis’s THE ACADEMY AND THE AWARD (Brandeis University, 485 pp., $40)? Pile these on the even fatter “Hollywood: The Oral History,” by Jeanine Basinger and Sam Wasson (Harper, 748 pages), and you’ll have jury-rigged something like a Norton Anthology of American Moviedom.There have been plenty of Academy annals before, of course: detailed compendiums, official and not; glossy adornments for the coffee table; and at least one prose investigation of its increasingly byzantine fashion system. But these often felt like sideshows, guidebooks: boosterish accessories to a main event that is now struggling to regain and maintain its centrality in international culture.With fewer than 10 million people in 2021 watching a telecast that once commanded five times that (a few more did tune in last year; viewership spiking after The Slap), and the box office for art films hardly afire, the new books land more like crisis management briefings.Things in the film industry have been bad before, they remind, and might yet get better again.There was, for example, 1934. In the middle of the Depression, reports Davis (a former Academy executive director who retired in 2011 and promptly plunged into its archives), the organization was forced to take up a collection from members, as if passing the plate in a church pew, so that the ceremony could go on.The Run-Up to the 2023 OscarsThe 95th Academy Awards will be presented on March 12 in Los Angeles.Asian Actors: A record number of actors of Asian ancestry were recognized with Oscar nominations this year. But historically, Asian stars have rarely been part of the awards.Hong Chau Interview: In a conversation with The Times, the actress, who is nominated for her supporting role in “The Whale,” says she still feels like an underdog.Andrea Riseborough Controversy: Confused about the brouhaha surrounding the best actress nominee? We explain why the “To Leslie” star’s nod was controversial.The Making of ‘Naatu Naatu’: The composers and choreographer from the Indian blockbuster “RRR” explain how they created the propulsive sequence that is nominated for best song.Or 1989, widely and unfairly remembered as the Worst Oscars Ever, which Schulman, a staff writer for The New Yorker, dissects like a forensic pathologist hovering over an overdressed corpse.The ceremony had become “a big, embarrassing yawn,” and Allan Carr, the caftan-wearing producer of “Grease” known as “Glittermeister, ” was hired to zhuzh it up, which he did with a caroming live-action Snow White — uncleared with Disney — singing “Proud Mary” with her Prince Charming, played by Rob Lowe, then a leader of the Brat Pack. The gaudy opening number, with stars ducking for cover as Snow roamed the aisles, ruined Carr’s career and possibly his life. The unfortunate actress, Eileen Bowman, was coerced into signing a nondisclosure agreement that forbade her to talk about the Oscars for 13 years.“Never trust a man in a caftan,” Lowe had, in fairness, warned her.Davis, whose book is subtitled “The Coming of Age of Oscar and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences,” focuses on the organization’s formative years, “an early life that deserves a bildungsroman.”But he is less Thomas Mann than diligent mythbuster, calling, for example, Susan Orlean’s assertion in her biography of Rin-Tin-Tin that the dog got more votes than any other male actor at the first Awards (repeated in this newspaper) “nonsense of a high order, now inserted into the historical record utterly without evidence.” In the ballot box Davis uncovered at the Margaret Herrick Library, there were no votes for the pooch.Davis also dispels the belief that the statuette was originally nicknamed by Bette Davis — no relation — because its backside resembled that of her then-husband Harman Oscar Nelson. He makes the case rather to credit a secretary of Norwegian descent, Eleanore Lilleberg, who was tired of referring to the “gold knights in her care” as “doodads, thingamajigs, hoozits and gadgets” and mentally conjured a military veteran with dignified bearing she’d known as a girl.This version of events, if true, is apt, for in Schulman’s framing, the Oscars have long been no mere contest but brutal hand-to-hand combat. He chronicles the 1951 best actress race between Davis (for “All About Eve”) and Gloria Swanson (for “Sunset Boulevard”); they lost to Judy Holliday (“Born Yesterday”) but the first two performances both proved more enduring, show business loving no subject better than itself.He retraces the long exile of the screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, perhaps the most prominent of the Hollywood Ten, blacklisted and driven behind pseudonyms for defying the House Un-American Activities Committee; credited and awarded for “Roman Holiday” only posthumously (his widow’s cat, satisfyingly, scratched up the thingamajig’s head).And no book called “Oscar Wars” could neglect how Harvey Weinstein, currently facing life in prison for his sex crimes, made the campaign nuclear in 1999 with “Shakespeare in Love.” The reign of this titan (and his eventual topple) was for the nation-state of Hollywood as consequential as Nixon’s for the U.S. government.He “made the Oscars dirty,” Schulman writes, using tricks like buying ads suggesting Miramax’s “The Piano” had won best picture at the preliminary critics’ awards (with “runner-up” in tiny print); relentlessly wooing senior citizens; parties, swag, ballot-commandeering and bad-mouthing his opponents. He even brought Daniel Day-Lewis to Washington to help get the American With Disabilities Act passed as a boost for “My Left Foot.”Along with the envelope, some context, please: Scandal has always beset Hollywood. Indeed, both authors note that the Academy was founded to raise the tone after a series of them, most notoriously the arrest of the Paramount actor Fatty Arbuckle after a starlet died in his hotel room following an orgy. Both in their own way document the race and gender inequity endemic to the institution, and its often ham-handed attempts to course-correct.And both conjure how exciting and special this event used to feel, with all its warts and overlength, like Christmas and New Year’s rolled into one.Now, as Oscar totters toward his 95th birthday, in a ceremony to be aired Sunday, March 12, going to a theater to see something screened feels fun but increasingly antique, like hopping on a wooden roller coaster (when I suggest it as a recreational activity to my teenagers, they look at me like I’m the MGM lion).It’s not just the pictures that have gotten small, as Swanson playing Norma Desmond declared — they’ve gotten really small, as we’re all Ernst Lubitsches now with cameras and flattering filters in our back pockets. The ceremony to commemorate them has shrunk as well.“I’m not sure I see a way to re-establish the Academy Awards as an experience for a wide swath of the country’s, or the world’s, population,” Davis writes. “It isn’t hard to see the Oscars on a track to becoming something like the National Book Awards” — heaven forfend! — “with way more glamorous presenters.” More