Christopher Nolan has been the recent recipient of the Oscar for Best Director and Best Picture for last year’s war biopic Oppenheimer. The film had a dream run during awards season this year, winning the top awards at the ceremony. However, this was Nolan’s second nomination as a director, with his first coming a few years ago for the war drama Dunkirk.
The World War II drama about the evacuation of British soldiers from Dunkirk Beach lost the Best Director Award to Guillermo Del Toro, who won for Shape of Water. Back then, Nolan had reportedly been hopeless about the ceremony and blamed Harvey Weinstein’s aggressive Oscar campaign for Shakespeare in Love for ruining the Oscars.
Christopher Nolan About Harvey Weinstein’s Impact On The Oscars
After years of making some of the best blockbuster films in the recent past, Christopher Nolan finally won the Academy Award for Best Director at this year’s Oscars. The filmmaker won the award for his WW II biopic Oppenheimer, which focused on the life of Robert J Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb. The film also won Best Picture.
However, the Oscars seemed to have mattered less to the filmmaker since the glory days of the awards. While the filmmaker had previously been nominated for Best Director for Dunkirk and for Original Screenplay for Memento, he had lost the former to Guillermo Del Toro for The Shape of Water and the latter to Gosford Park.
Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk was one of the top contenders for the award but ended up being snubbed. The film ended up winning Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing, and Best Film Editing. At the time, Nolan expressed his opinion about how the Academy Awards had become a ceremony that honored films to become a marketing ploy.
Nolan said to Tom Shone in his book ‘The Nolan Variations‘ how the Oscars were turned into a marketing campaign after Harvey Weinstein’s aggressive campaign for Miramax films,
“People always talk about the Academy as if it’s one mind, and it’s not at all. It’s a bunch of individuals. I think one thing that Harvey Weinstein did is, he constructed a business model where the awards were part of the marketing campaign. It used to be rewarding a film and now it’s helping a film. The awards are part of a patronage system, you might say, and with Dunkirk, we were lucky enough not to need it.”
Christopher Nolan has been known for pushing the limits in the blockbuster genre with films such as The Dark Knight, Inception, and Interstellar.
Harvey Weinstein Changed The Oscars For The Worse In 1999
While Christopher Nolan had to secede after losing to The Shape of Water in 2017, another World War II film was at the losing end of an aggressive Oscar campaign which changed the awards for the worse. Ironically, it was for a film helmed by Steven Spielberg, who handed over the Best Director Oscar to Nolan at this year’s award ceremony.
In 1999, Spielberg’s harrowing war drama Saving Private Ryan was a top contender for the Best Picture, gaining ten other nominations. The Jurassic Park director won the Best Director Oscar moments before and many reportedly believed that the war epic would win the highest award. However, when Harrison Ford announced the award for Best Picture, it was the Gwyneth Paltrow starrer Shakespeare in Love that won.
According to BBC, the film was the subject of a vigorous campaign by Miramax studio head and producer Harvey Weinstein. The producer reportedly launched an aggressive campaign to make Shakespeare in Love win many of the coveted categories. In an oral history by The Hollywood Reporter, many of the insiders of Miramax mentioned that Weinstein showed the press VHS copies of the unfinished film to make sure that they held space for it.
He also reportedly got the then-First Lady Hillary Clinton to host the premiere of the film at the end of the year and took out multiple ads for the film in noted magazines and newspapers. When the nominations were announced, Shakespeare in Love was reportedly still in theaters, acting as promotional material for ticket sales. (via THR).
Harvey Weinstein finally got what he wanted when Shakespeare in Love won the Best Picture Oscar, along with six other wins. The move by the studio head has been regarded as one of the worst things to have happened to the Oscars as the ceremony pivoted from being about awarding the best films to being a feather on the cap for its marketing campaign.
