An Oscar campaign to rival all others

• British actor Andrea Riseborough’s nomination follows many shady efforts to win an Academy award

It has been a wild week for British actor Andrea Riseborough, who last week earned what many felt was a surprising best actress Oscar nomination for her performance in the tiny, under-the-radar indie, To Leslie.

The film, a gritty kitchen sink realist drama about a struggling poor white, single mother who wins the lottery but blows her winnings and becomes a terrible drunk and addict, made just $28,000 at the box office on its release in 2022.

However, thanks to a sly but effective campaign by Riseborough and director Michael Morris — who made sure that as many as possible of their famous actor friends and members of the actors’ branch of the Academy saw the film — Riseborough’s name began to be mentioned as a contender for an award on social media and in the trade press in the weeks leading up to the nominations announcement.

Luminaries such as Jane Fonda, Edward Norton and Helen Hunt all posted glowing compliments on Riseborough’s performance and the film’s social media accounts worked overtime to push for her nomination. Almost as soon as Riseborough and the To Leslie team were popping the champagne last week, they found themselves at the centre of a maelstrom of controversy as the Academy announced that it would review their campaign procedures.

At particular issue was a since-deleted Instagram post from the To Leslie account, which quoted a best-of-2022 piece written by Chicago Times critic Richard Roeper, who wrote: “As much as I admired [Cate] Blanchett’s work in Tár, my favourite performance by a woman this year was delivered by the chameleon-like Andrea Riseborough in director Michael Morris’s searing drama about a mom at the final crossroads in her life after she’s lost everything due to her drinking.” Someone complained to the Academy that it violated a campaign rule, which prohibits any reference to “other nominees”.

Riseborough’s campaign is only one in a long list of aggressive alternative forms of marketing and promotion of a film in the build-up to the Oscars. In the 1976 race, Carol Kane earned her only best female actor nomination for her role in the Yiddish language drama Hester Street, after she enlisted the help of Hollywood public relations guru Max Burkett. He ran around town attending celebrity parties, carrying a copy of the film with him, which he would run for stars such as Frank Sinatra after dinner. Kane didn’t win but Burkett made sure that she was seen enough to earn her a place on the nominations list.

Chill Wills, one of the stars of John Wayne’s 1960 jingoistic Western The Alamo also secured the help of a PR agent

— the infamous WS “BowWow” Wojciechowicz — to run an aggressive campaign, in which he took out full-page ads in the trade magazines. These listed every Academy member alphabetically and had a tagline reading “win, lose or draw, you’re all my cousins and I love you all”. The sickly sentimental move worked for Wills who won himself a nomination even though he eventually lost to Peter Ustinov.

In 1988, Sally Kirkland embarked on one of the most infamous self-promotion campaigns for her work in the drama Anna. Knowing that the small, independent film had no budget for an awards campaign, Kirkland took matters into her own hands — writing letters to all the Academy members she knew, enlisting the help of friends to promote her work, talking to any journalist she could get her hands on and even spending her own money to take out trade ads. Kirkland earned a best female actor nomination, but lost to Cher on Oscar night.

As Riseborough’s co-star Marc Maron complained this week on his WTF podcast, “Millions of dollars [are] put into months and months of advertising campaigns, publicity, screenings by large corporate entertainment entities and Andrea was championed by her peers through a grassroots campaign which was pushed through by a few actors.” He added that the Academy’s investigation showed that Riseborough’s campaign “so threatens their system [and] that they’re completely bought out by corporate interests in the form of studios”.

Perhaps no-one changed the nature of Oscar campaigning as much as the now disgraced former mogul Harvey Weinstein, who became notorious for launching expensive, lavish campaigns to woo members in support of his films. Weinstein would host screenings at Academy retirement homes, accost members at lavish vacation spots, outspend everyone on advertising and bad-mouth and spread rumours about his competitors in his efforts at

Oscar glory for Miramax films and stars. Films Weinstein worked on racked up 81 Oscars before his fall from grace.

The To Leslie campaign’s name-checking of a competitor, while it seemed to obviously flout an Academy rule, isn’t even the first time a campaign has erred in this regard. In 2004, campaign ads printed in Daily Variety to promote the performance of Shohreh Aghdashloo in the drama House of Sand and Fog, included excerpts from newspapers citing critics’ predictions of “who should win” and “who will win” to show that she was the favourite ahead of Rene Zellweger. Aghdashloo earned a nomination in spite of protests against these “attack ads”, though she lost to Zellweger.

The controversy finally ended this week when the Academy announced that Riseborough’s nomination will stand but that its investigation had discovered “social media and outreach campaigning tactics that caused concern. These tactics are being addressed with the responsible parties directly”.

It’s all been a distracting storm in a teacup, but maybe it points to a flaw in the Academy’s meritocratic facade that needs serious reassessment in the future. Whether it makes Riseborough one of the few outsiders to campaign their own way to an Oscar statue successfully remains to be seen, but you can be sure that come awards night on March 13, all eyes will be on her.