But in the world of awards, the death of Miramax means more than that. Over the past 25 years, no studio has dominated the Oscars the way Miramax did, in ways both good and bad.
Harvey and Bob Weinstein’s company revolutionized awards season, turned Oscar campaigning into a contact sport, infuriated rivals, led to new Academy campaign regulations, caused a change in the Best Picture rules … and, along the way, did a very, very good job of winning Oscar nominations and taking home statuettes.
Including Roberto Benigni, recipient of what screenwriter William Goldman famously called “the scummiest award in the Academy’s history.”
Miramax pushed the boundaries and reaped the rewards – and if they left disgruntled rivals complaining about their tactics, you’d hardly expect any different when, for instance, an indie company gets as many Oscar nominations as Warner Bros., Universal, 20th Century Fox, Sony and Disney (its parent company) combined, as they did at the 2002 Oscars.
“Miramax has gone at the whole idea of campaigning in a way that just hadn’t been seen before,” said Bruce Davis, the Academy’s executive director, a few years ago. “They see it as a competitive sport, and look for every edge, every angle. And they’re not the only ones responsible, because the others have felt the need to step up and match them.”
In a way, the Weinsteins built their company with awards: landing Oscars for films like “My Left Foot,” “The Crying Game” and “The Piano” gave the company credibility with actors and filmmakers, who saw it as a place that knew how to follow through.
By early 1990s, Miramax had become the most aggressive Oscar campaigner in the game – not only sending out screeners, but hiring consultants and working all aspects of the game. Sometimes they were too aggressive: an overly elaborate package containing the videocassette of “Il Postino” cost them two Oscar tickets when the Academy found it unseemly.
For the 1994 Oscars, the year of Miramax’s “Pulp Fiction,” they won 22 nominations, a dozen more than their new parent company, Disney, and five more than the second-place studio, Paramount. In the Best Supporting Actress and Best Original Screenplay categories, they had four of the five nominees; in Best Director, they had three of the five. (They won in the first two categories, lost in the third.)
At the 1997 Oscars, the Miramax film “Good Will Hunting” went head-to-head with a James Cameron juggernaut, “Titanic,” and Harvey Weinstein tried his best to play the gutty little underdog: “If Jim Cameron is saying size matters, then we at Miramax are saying less is more,” he told CNN.
The following year, Miramax came out on top in an epic Oscar battle with DreamWorks. The latter studio’s film, Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan,” had been the frontrunner for most of the year, while Miramax positioned its lighter “Shakespeare in Love” as the alternative for those who didn’t feel “Private Ryan” was top-drawer Spielberg.
When writers began pointing out that “Ryan” never quite lived up to the promise of its remarkable opening D-Day sequence, fingers were pointed at Harvey for spreading that angle; when campaign spending reached record levels, DreamWorks chief Jeffrey Katzenberg blamed Harvey.
“There is no question that the extraordinary campaign Miramax has run in support of ‘Shakespeare’ has caused us to do more on behalf of ‘Ryan’ than we had initially planned,” he said to the Los Angeles Times.
After a campaign that was rumored to have cost the two studios as much as $15 million each, “Shakespeare” scored the upset victory. As one of the film’s five credited producers, Harvey Weinstein took the stage and delivered an acceptance speech, whereupon he became the first best-picture winner in years to be played off by the orchestra before he’s finished talking.
Three months later, the Academy’s board of governors passed a new rule that said no more than three producers would be credited on a Best Picture nominee.
Miramax went head-to-head with DreamWorks again the next year, when Weinstein had “The Cider House Rules” and Katzenberg had “American Beauty.” This time DreamWorks won, after the companies spent so much money that host Billy Crystal turned it into a joke, as he introduced a man who’d been given a reward for finding lost Oscar statuettes.
That race required some finessing—and, perhaps, some misreprentation – on the part of Miramax.
“American Beauty,” the frontrunner, was tough stuff, dealing with anomie, voyeurism, pedophilia, homosexuality and other undercurrents running through suburbia.
Source:thewrap.com/