The screening room on the fourth floor of a building in West Hollywood seats forty-two people in reclining leather chairs, and between October and February it is almost never empty. Every evening, a different film is shown to a different handful of voters from the various guilds and academies whose ballots will decide the season's prizes. Afterwards there is usually a reception with wine, small plates and, crucially, the director, who will spend an hour shaking hands and remembering names.
This is the visible part of an awards campaign, the part that everyone in the industry acknowledges and nobody much likes. Beneath it lies a vast apparatus of strategy, spending and persuasion that can cost a studio tens of millions of dollars per film. Its practitioners, the awards consultants, are among the most powerful people in the business and among the least known outside it. They prefer it that way, and most will speak only without their names attached.
A campaign begins long before a film is released, often before it is finished. Consultants advise on which festival should host the premiere, which critics should see it first and which of its actors should be positioned in lead or supporting categories. That last decision can be decisive. An actor with a large role might be placed in the supporting category because the field is weaker there, a manoeuvre known in the trade, without irony, as category fraud.
The narrative is the product
The central task, every consultant agrees, is to build a narrative. Voters see dozens of films a season, and they need a reason to remember one over the others. The narrative might be about the film itself, its urgency or its craft, but more often it is about the people who made it: a veteran overdue for recognition, a newcomer who overcame long odds, a director who fought the studio to get the film made. Stories win prizes.
Nobody votes for a film. They vote for how the film made them feel about themselves for having seen it. My job is to manage that feeling.
Margot Ellery-Nakamura, one of the few consultants willing to speak on the record, has run campaigns for more than twenty years. She describes the work as a mixture of diplomacy, event planning and something close to therapy. Directors, she notes, often find the process humiliating: months of dinners, panels and repeated anecdotes, all while pretending not to care about winning. Her role, as she sees it, is to protect them from the worst of it while keeping the film in conversation.
The system has obvious flaws. Films backed by large studios with deep pockets enjoy an enormous advantage over smaller independent productions, regardless of quality. Voters, overwhelmed by screeners, often rely on reputation and buzz rather than watching every contender. Reform efforts have made some difference, with limits on certain kinds of lobbying and events, but consultants simply adapt. When one tactic is banned, another quietly takes its place, usually at a dinner party.
Yet Ellery-Nakamura insists that the best films still tend to find their way through. A great campaign, she says, can get a good film noticed, but it cannot make voters love something they do not. On a Tuesday in January, the screening room is full for a small Iranian-Canadian drama with no stars and a modest budget. When the lights come up, nobody moves for a long moment. She checks her phone and smiles. That silence, she says, is worth more than any dinner.
