How Much Does it Cost to Buy an Oscar?

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This weekend, we all have to ask ourselves one important question. Am I Team Barbie or Team Oppenheimer? That's right, The ninety six Academy Awards are happening this Sunday, Everyone's favorite award show, the super Bowl of the movies. This year promises to be an all stops pulled out kind of event, from the red carpet fashions to the box office busting nominees to a non singer performing a Best Song nominee in a major spectacle with Ryan Gosling's I'm Just.

Ken, I'm Just Trade anywhere else upy.

But the Oscars weren't always so glitzy in the beginning. The ceremony was a pretty humble affair.

Race in nineteen twenty nine was the first Academy Awards.

I think it was the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel.

And the actual award giving was around fifteen minutes long.

Fast forward almost a century later, an Oscar Night looks pretty different. But to movie studios, winning is more important than ever. An oscar can translate into millions of dollars in box office and streaming revenues. Not to mention ragging rights and to secure their shot at capturing those coveted statuettes, those studios have started spending enormous amounts of money and employing armies of marketers. Getting an Oscar has become a big,

I just went guys today to pick up my Oscar credentials and the entire street, Hollywood Boulevard has been closed off for a week.

That's my colleague Chris Paul Mary. He covers Hollywood and the entertainment industry.

For Bloomberg, elaborate sets being designed, their intense security, or an incredible effort that goes way beyond just you know, a party in a ballroom.

And for the studios, the Oscars mark the finish line for the month's long campaign. Studios will often invest millions of dollars hire teams of specialists, all in the name of snagging a win, and there's a bit of a formula to it these days. That's according to author and Oscar historian Michael Schulman, how do.

You win an oscar? I mean, Step one, obviously is to make an incredible movie.

Step two, get your movie and the story of your movie in front of as many people as possible.

Oscar campaigns are like political campaigns, you know, in the sense that you have the messaging and the ground games. So the messaging is through advertisements, interviews. What you want the narrative to be for a certain person, whether it's you know, an actor who's long overdue and kind of a career award, or a really bold subversive movie, or a bio pick that's giving due to some figure who

Speech, and after that comes the ground game.

In presidential politics, you see like politicians kissing babies at the Iowa State Fair. In the oscar race, it's you know, movie stars going to cocktail parties and you know, shaking hands with voters and you know, doing Q and as and fancy screening rooms and stuff. So it's a bit more chic obviously than the Iowa caucus, but in another sense, it's the exact same.

Thing, very expensive chic caucuses. Studios pour tons of resources into these efforts. Shelman says. Netflix has earmarked as much as one hundred million dollars every year on its OSCARS campaign alone, and that's led to the creation of a bunch of Academy regulations, Chris told us, limiting how far studios can go to get their gold.

There's pages and pages of rules on what you can and can't do. For example, you're allowed to invite people to screening some movies after the nominations. That is all throttled back in big way. You can still have a screening, you just can't. You can't wind and nine people. So there's all kinds of rules that have come about as the Academy has tried to calibrate the amount of campaigning going on.

Sort of like campaign finance laws, but for the movies, says Shelman.

What you can say in an ad, what you can't say in an ad, What kind of party you can throw at which point in the campaign you know for instance, we all know this phrase for your consideration. Well, people say that because you actually can't directly solicit votes. You know, you can't say vote from my movie in so many words, and in fact people have been disqualified from their nominations for doing just that. So these rules are enforced.

But things weren't always this way. In fact, the entire Oscar Inc. Industry, all of the wild spending and months of campaigning, can be traced back to one moment, actually, one film, back in nineteen ninety nine. The movie was a romantic comedy, Shakespeare in Love, and it set its sights on an Oscar for Best Picture. At the time, says Chris, Nobody nobody thought Shakespeare in Love would win.

Oh yes so, And it seems funny now to even think about the competition, because Saving Private Ryan is a movie I've watched numerous times and so widely regarded, if not the certainly one of the best war movies ever made. And Shakespeare in Love I've seen once, no great desire O great.

I got a stand up for Shakespeare in Love. That's a great film.

I'll give it another shot. Okay, obviously it was the best.

Picture after the break, the controversial figure behind this first real Oscar campaign, and how it continues to set the standard for award season as we know it. We're back in nineteen ninety nine. Movie lovers and Oscars watchers were stunned when Shakespeare in Love snagged the Academy Award for Best Picture over Saving Private Ryan. But a lot of strategy and a lot of money had gone to that moment,

Harvey Weinstein Mirrimax was the guy who sort of really took oscar campaigning to the next level. It was a real bare knuckle sort of fight. You know, there was there was always a bit of entertaining involved and getting people to come out, you know, Academy members to see the movies. But in Weinstein Error, it was it was like phone calls. It was showing up at the retirement home for aged actors and you know, literally doing everything

Oscar historian Michael Schulman says, Harvey Weinstein pulled out all the stops. Hollywood and just about every place else was saturated with Shakespeare in Love.

You couldn't get in your car in la without hearing the score of Shakespeare in Love. And they ran an advertisement during Monica Lewinski's interview with Barbara Walters, of course, the Saving Private ryand people were furious that they did that.

In response to these efforts, DreamWorks, the studio behind Saving Private Ryan, began escalating its own behind the scenes maneuvers to try and secure the votes of Academy members, But Shakespeare in Love had too much of a head start, and to the shock of many, took home the Best Picture Award.

Many people thought, rightly or wrongly, that Weinstein had basically bought the win. So what happened the next year was that every other studio in Hollywood thought, well, we're not going to let this happen again. We're not going to, let you know, Miramax, this indie movie company from New York come and steal our oscars.

After Weinstein pulled out all the stops. Took this to an level, the modern day business of winning an oscar was kind of born, or the genie is out of the bottle. What about now? What are the elements of the business of winning an oscar?

It's still a huge business for a big movie in Oppenheimer, you know, twenty five million dollars in Oscar campaign. He is not out of the question.

And the campaigns have only gotten more elaborate, creative, and of course expensive, says Shulman.

It's like insane the stuff that the money is spent on to just drown people in swag essentially, but it's also make them pay attention. You can't make someone like your movie, but you can make them pay attention to it and remember it, and you know, most importantly, watch it, because nobody's going to vote for or nominate for something that they haven't watched in the first place.

Does all this investment really pay off? Chris says, the Oscar's bump is real.

The increase that of films historically have gotten in theaters it can certainly lead to tens of millions more in box office. For sure? Is this in the streaming error. It doesn't immediately translate into dollars, but they'll certainly see an increase in viewers.

But a lot of what we know about the Oscar's industrial complex is speculation, says Chris. He says as a reporter in Hollywood, he certainly experiences and sees some of the campaigning, but it's hard to get the studios to openly reveal what they're doing.

It's so hard to get anyone to actually talk about Oscar because they don't ever want to admit that this happens. You know, it's both high profile and low profile, and the why and what they're doing and how much this spending is all kept hidden. The industry is always going to fight to win these awards, and the spending will continue to escalate because it's just so important to everybody in Hollywood.

Millions of dollars were spent by Oscar contenders this year, and millions of people are expected to tune in on Sunday to see whose efforts paid off. We'll get to take home that best picture Oscar and who is just Ken I'm just Sarah Holder, and there's so many people we'd like to thank for this episode. This episode was produced by Alex Suguiera and Matt Goldman. It was edited by Stacy vanick Smith. It was fact checked by Naomi En. It was mixed by Veronica Rodriguez. Our senior producers are