The goodie bags have been distributed, all 16,500 sq ft of the red carpet has been rolled out, and armpits are being injected with Botox. Everything is in place for Sunday, when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will announce the 2016 winners for the 88th Oscars.
This year there are 121 nominees for 24 categories, and the polls for Academy members closed on Tuesday. So how do you win an Oscar?
It’s too late to make the cut for this year’s awards, but if you’ve got winning an Academy award in your sights, here is what you probably need to get doing.
Be a middle-aged man – or young woman – and white
The Academy’s huge diversity problem has become ever so obvious with this year’s nominations, leading Spike Lee, Will Smith and others to refuse to attend the “lily white” awards show. All but one of the acting, directing and writing nominees are white this year, despite strong non-white contenders.
There have only been 33 black winners in history – out of a total of 2,947 Oscars given out since the inception of the awards. Only one black woman has ever won best actress, and only three black men have been nominated for best director (none of them have won).
On top of this, just 21% of nominees in behind-the-camera roles this year are women. If you are a woman, be young: the average age to win best actress is 36, compared with 44 for men. Ask three-time-nominee (and one-time winner) Jennifer Lawrence, who is just 25.
Perhaps revealingly, the Academy is quite opaque about its 6,028 members, all industry professionals – but a 2012 Los Angeles Times investigation revealed that 94% of them were white, 77% were male and the median age was 62, with only 14% members younger than 50.
Go through a physical transformation
If you’re an actor, the less you look like yourself, the better. It is well-known how much the Academy loves actors to put themselves through hell.
Leonardo DiCaprio’s The Revenant role had him sleeping in animal carcasses and eating raw bison and “going in and out of frozen rivers”. That alone should increase his already sky-high chances of winning (another tip: repeatedly fail to win until everyone is convinced that it’s “your turn”).
From Nicole Kidman’s Virginia Woolf nose to Gwyneth Paltrow’s moustache via Charlize Theron’s Monster and countless others, gruelling transformations are usually rewarded more highly than lower key, more subtle-looking, contemporary-set acting.
Make a war movie, family tragedy, or something related to Watergate
Two sociologists at UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) did a study which looked at IMDb data for 3,000 Oscar-eligible movies (released between 1985 and 2009) to see which genres were most likely to get nominations.
They found that war movies, historical epics and biographies were favoured by the Academy. Keywords that proved to be Oscar bait were “family tragedy”, “whistleblower”, “Pulitzer prize source”, “physical therapy”, “domestic servant”, and “Watergate”.
Warning: stay well away from the following: “zombie”, “breast implant” and “black independent film”. Oh, and try to set your film in New York city, the location with most best picture wins (16).
Convince your fellow professionals first
Who nominates movies for Oscars? First, your film needs to be eligible – which means it must fulfil general rules such as meet release date criteria, and then specific rules for each nomination category.
Each entry is nominated by members of the relevant Academy branch (so director nominations are put forward by the directors, actors are nominated by Screen Actors Guild members) by secret ballot.
Some, such as foreign language film or animated feature, have slightly more complicated rules. And all 6,000+ members of the Academy are eligible to vote for best picture nominees. According to calculations by entertainment and media news website The Wrap, convincing 300 of them is enough to secure a nomination.
… and make sure voters know how to vote
For the best picture category, the Academy, unlike Bafta and others, uses a preferential ballot system. In heavily contested years, this means voters’ second or third preference might be more important than their first, as the counting process successively eliminates the movie with the fewest first-place votes, giving them to each ballot’s second-ranked movie.
However, apparently many Academy members still don’t quite understand this system, writes Awards columnist Pete Hammond on Deadline. Voters can submit their preferences through a paper system or online.
Perhaps worryingly, however, one of them told Los Angeles Times: “With the digital thing, I worry that I’ll have a couple of drinks and then jump on my computer and vote,” says the voter. “It’s the same reason you don’t drink and tweet.”
Autumn is the season
Any feature-length film that was released in 2015 and exhibited for paid admission in Los Angeles county for at least seven days is eligible, but really, all serious contenders come out in the months leading up to the awards – usually, by screening them in festivals before their theatrical releases.
After studios distribute the summer blockbusters, the Venice festival kicks off “awards season” in September, and is followed by Telluride, Toronto and New York.
Films progressively enter the race, then come media campaigns and precursor awards such the SAG Awards, the Golden Globes and the Baftas, which tend to be pretty reliable indicators of how the Academy is going to sway.
Campaign, campaign, campaign
Are you in a Harvey Weinstein film? If not, you’d better get working. Hollywood’s most influential producer is well-known for getting all the nods. He famously single-handedly got Shakespeare in Love a best picture win instead of Saving Private Ryan.
The things he’s done in the campaign process include: having an actor testify in front of Senate; and reportedly setting up personalised screenings at the Motion Picture Retirement Home – or wherever Academy members were spending their holidays.
Actors take part in campaigning as well. This isn’t only about using every break you possibly can from filming to attend festivals and major events – it involves private screenings, mingling with Academy voters and more.
Make sure to tread close to, but not step over, the Academy’s line. Good examples for you to mirror would be this year’s Brie Larson, Leonardo DiCaprio, Alicia Vikander and Sylvester Stallone, who all have been seen relentlessly promoting their films on red carpets, mingling with Academy voters, attending lunches and gathering goodwill from everyone. We shall see if it has paid off.
But it might all be about to change
In light of the #OscarsSoWhite campaign, the academy announced it would take “dramatic steps” to “alter the makeup of our membership”.
“The mandate is inclusion in all of its facets: gender, race, ethnicity and sexual orientation,” said president Cheryl Boone Isaacs’s statement in January.
She has since announced that she aims to double the number of women and “diverse” members of the Academy by 2020, and introduce a rule whereby in order to retain the right to vote members need to have worked in the industry in the past 10 years, or have been nominated for an Oscar.
