FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION MONEY TALKS, BUT WILL ACADEMY VOTERS LISTEN?

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

You normal citizens reading this are lucky. You only had to suffer through an extra month of politicking and media manipulation following last year's presidential election.

Guys like me, whose job it is to cover the movies, still have about three more months of the nonsense to go.

In the trade, this is called ``awards season,'' although the only ones to whom it matters - and those in their employ whose job it is to think it matters - really just care about the Oscars. Sure, they'll all turn up at the Golden Globes ceremonies next Sunday, and the winners will pretend to actually feel validated by it. But unless they're Jim Carrey, all they'll actually be thinking is ``improved academy chances!''

That's because only Oscars translate into bigger box office, and thus higher salaries. And seeing as how both egos and uncertain careers - which are basically the two key elements of the Hollywood condition - can be salved by this award like no other, this happens every year.

Only this time around, it's worse than ever. Where's John McCain when Hollywood really needs him? Not to threaten censorship, but to do something about Oscar campaign reform.

To be fair, there are members of the film community who find the ever- rising tide of awards season hype over cinematic substance (fueled by that political mother's milk, money) absurd, unhealthy or downright disgusting.

``God, you guys are obsessed!'' laughed Cate Blanchett, a 1998 Best Actress nominee for ``Elizabeth'' and possible contender for ``The Gift'' this year, when asked for Oscar prognostications. ``You're obsessed! It's sick; you need help.''

``It's nice to get it, but there's no big deal with it,'' added Anthony Hopkins, whose reprise of his Academy Award-winning, flesh-eating Dr. Lecter from ``The Silence of the Lambs'' can be seen next month in ``Hannibal.'' ``If I let all of that stuff get to me, I'd go nuts. I know there's a lot of industry stuff about having to get Golden Globe nominations and all that. Well, OK, fine, but I don't like being involved in it.''

And from two-time acting nominee Sean Penn, a vocal critic of anything he considers anti-art in the film industry: ``It's valuable like a commercial is valuable, if (Academy Awards) get people into theaters to see movies. But because it's framed in a business that likes to pat itself on the back through this absurd system of determining what the best is that, very rarely, makes room for the best to participate at all. It just reinforces the stupidity.''

Such perspectives may be refreshing, but they aren't exactly prevalent. For the most part, anybody who thinks he or she can advance in the industry through even the flimsiest connection to Oscar glory dreams up ways to do so. I'm not quite sure which is worse: that outfits like the National Board of Texas Panhandle Internet Broadcast People Who See Movies actually bother to announce that they didn't see anything better than ``Erin Brockovich'' last year, or that Oscar campaign strategists assess, to the exclusion of any other kind of consideration, what it means for the Academy Awards - and exploit accordingly.

Misguided as these trends have been, they've taken a particularly ironic turn this season. The general unimpressiveness of the year 2000's movie releases has given studios, talent, publicists and the groups responsible for the ever-increasing number of award citations that nobody really cares about the wrong impression: that we want to hear even more unearned praise than they usually subject us to for this mediocre product.

Of course, some of the work that's being touted ``for your consideration'' in brightly colored ads in the entertainment trade papers is laudable. The problem is that too much stuff that is clearly lacking in artistry, accomplishment or degree of difficulty is promoted, often at a more intense level than work that risked and achieved more.

For example, the annual, ridiculous contest between DreamWorks and Miramax to buy the Best Picture Oscar is once again in full swing. Only this year, the respective studios don't have anything on the level of a ``Saving Private Ryan,'' ``Shakespeare in Love'' or ``American Beauty'' to push. Undaunted, they're flooding newsstands with ``Gladiator'' and ``Chocolat'' ad-festooned covers of Variety and the Hollywood Reporter.

And while both of these companies are admirably putting resources behind other contenders (better ones, in the case of DreamWorks' ``Chicken Run,'' ``Almost Famous'' and, in acting respects, ``The Contender''; worse where Miramax's ``All the Pretty Horses'' and ``Malena'' are concerned), the overall effect is to get voters and commentators to think along a line similar to the lesser-of-two-evils rationalization many applied to their choice of George W. Bush or Al Gore.

It goes something like this: Since there weren't any great movies last year, voters shouldn't worry about aesthetic quality and thoughtlessly support the film that fits into the traditional academy category they prefer, be it visceral but formulaic historical spectacle or easy-to-digest fluff that flatters but doesn't challenge unexamined progressive attitudes.

Of course, efforts are being made on behalf of worthy films that don't conform to traditional academy prejudices, such as the phenomenally popular, Mandarin-language martial arts movie ``Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,'' the no-holds-barred, adults-only examination of drug addiction ``Requiem for a Dream'' and such surprisingly insightful looks into the always tough-to-film lives of writers as ``Wonder Boys'' and ``Before Night Falls.''

But other, equally worthwhile movies - ``George Washington,'' ``Chuck & Buck,'' ``Croupier'' - are not being pitched as strongly to academy voters, either because they were released by companies that can't afford costly Oscar ads or are considered too challenging for the members to get.

New Line Cinema, for instance, has mounted a credible campaign for its Kennedy White House drama ``Thirteen Days,'' a gripping but nonthreatening political thriller set in the minimally controversial past. Yet nothing is being done to promote the studio's far more imaginative and upsetting Spike Lee screed against media racism, ``Bamboozled.''

Now, it's true that ``Bamboozled'' was not popular and is certainly not a pleasant entertainment by any conventional measure of the term, nor has its director ever been an academy favorite. But to not even encourage voters to screen a video of something that overflows with strong social and artistic content isn't so much about focused campaign management as it is making a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Meanwhile, Miramax ran standard newspaper ads aimed squarely at academy voters last week, touting the souffle-weight ``Chocolat'' as some kind of important statement about tolerance, with recommendations from esteemed civic leaders alongside the standard critics' raves.

Fox Searchlight could be praised for refraining from using a similar, politically correct blackmail technique for ``Quills.'' Then again, that studio's quieter campaign for its much smarter and confrontational movie about repression and acceptance could be another example of not wasting too much money on academy voters whose tastes are presumed to be, well, intolerant of anything that dares offend to make a point.

These all may or may not be plausible strategies for winning elections, but it seems like a mighty poor way to reward creative vision. It's enough to make one nostalgic for the debate over pregnant chads - which, in retrospect, seems more and more essential every time I'm told that it might work against Steven Soderbergh if he's nominated for directing both ``Brockovich'' and ``Traffic.''

I don't know what can be done about the hyper-politicization of the Academy Awards. After all, the competition naturally lends itself to the process. And the situation has been worse at times in the past, from the academy's origins as a sweetheart union to the bloc voting moguls forced their employees to do during the studio contract days.

But one thing individual members can do is remember that the organization calls itself the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, not of Motion Picture Money and Manipulation (more than enough of that goes on in the day-to-day business of Hollywood). If they want an honest contest, or at least one that the public will consider more legitimate than last year's presidential election, they should try to take a scientific approach to seeking out and judging the art of 2000's cinema.

That means seeing past the flashy campaigns, examining overspun opinions and statistics with measured skepticism and open-mindedness, and voting by standards more rigorous than they're immediate emotional responses to any given movie.

Oh yeah, and remember- have fun. It really isn't that big a deal.

``THE 58TH ANNUAL GOLDEN GLOBE AWARDS''

What: The Hollywood Foreign Press hand out statuettes for excellence in film and television.

Where: NBC (Channel 4).

When: 8 p.m. Jan. 21 (tape delayed on the West Coast).

CAPTION(S):

5 photos

Photo:

(1 -- 2 -- cover -- color) Running wild

The studios are spending big money to win the Golden Globes and more for the big prize, the Oscars. Like Washington, Hollywood needs to look into some campaign finance reform 

(3 -- 6) no caption (movie ads, magazines)