Oscar Voters Schooled in Ethics

To the outside world, last March's Oscars were marred by the Iraq war, which forced stars like Nicole Kidman off the rolled-up red carpet.

To the inside world, the awards show was marred by ad campaigns perceived as being in bad taste, even by Hollywood standards.

Academy Award organizers can't do much about the former, but they're working on the latter.

The Motion Picture Academy on Wednesday issued an eight-page booklet, urging its 6,000-plus members--actors, producers, Weinstein brothers--to obey the "E" word during Oscar season.

Ethics.

"Hollywood people are as ethical as anyone else and we're going to ask them to prove it," Academy spokesman John Pavlik said Thursday.

Specifically, the Academy is asking voters to refrain from making public spectacles of themselves: Don't give interviews hyping a contender, don't write newspaper columns hyping a contender, don't go crazy with parties or ad buys.

Last spring, Miramax took heat for reprinting, in ad form, an op-ed piece from venerable Academy Award-winning director Robert Wise. The column praised Martin Scorsese, helmer of Miramax's Oscar entry, Gangs of New York.

The ad angered the Academy and Academy members alike. The Academy said it violated a rule prohibiting Oscar voters from publicly revealing their Oscar picks. Director Barry Levinson called it a too-blatant plea for support. "You look at an ad like that and say, 'My God, why don't we just give money to people and tell them how to vote?" Levinson told the Los Angeles Times in March.

The ad embarrassed Miramax when it was revealed the column had been penned not by Wise, but by a studio publicist who had interviewed the filmmaker. In the end, the Oscar-less Scorsese lost--again.

Pavlik said it was "the totality of [recent Oscar season conduct], rather than anything specific," including the Wise ad, that prompted the Academy to issue its unprecedented guidelines.

The Academy, Pavlik said, didn't like the press focusing on campaign controversies, instead on the awards.

The new booklet doesn't lay down new rules. (The Academy did that in July, formally forbidding blurbs from Oscar voters in ads.) "This is more like a, 'You know what's right, do it,'" Pavlik said.

Pavlik said it's too soon to say how Academy membership will respond to the guidelines. But it's not to soon for at least one veteran Oscar observer to claim nothing will change.

"Every time they set up a new rule, someone finds a weasel way under the fence," said Tom O'Neil, author of Movie Awards: The Ultimate, Unofficial Guide to the Oscars, Golden Globes, Critics, Guild and Indie Honors.

For instance, O'Neil said, when the Academy frowned on private screenings featuring meet-and-greets with the stars, studios got creative and opened up their Q-and-A screenings to guild members (actors, directors, writers). Last Oscar season, The Hours trio of Kidman, Julianne Moore and Meryl Streep did so many of those appearances, they "pretty much looked like the Spice Girls on tour," O'Neill said. Kidman and Moore got Oscar nominations for the film; Kidman got the Oscar.

Not that O'Neil, host of the award-show-tracking Website, Gold Derby, thinks the Oscars is in need of an inquest. He said no average Oscar fan was affected by the Wise controversy, and argued the Wise controversy wasn't much of one in the first place. After all, he said, Miramax didn't put words in Wise's mouth--he said what he said, just as, in Oscar's 2002 season, Julia Roberts said she thought Denzel Washington deserved (and got) a second Oscar.

"The issue here is Hollywood can't stop thinking like Hollywood," O'Neil said. "...They see a lot more [sinister] Peter Lorres around the corner than actually exist."

The drama will play out February 29, when the 76th Annual Academy Awards are scheduled to be presented, ethics and all.