OSCAR'S CHANGE OF PACE FILM FLACKS WEATHER SCREENER CONTROVERSY, ACCELERATED CAMPAIGN - AND CROSS THEIR FINGERS.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Writer

This year's Academy Awards process was hit by seismic changes.

The moving up of this year's ceremony by approximately a month and last fall's unexpected, temporary ban on sending home ``screeners'' of potential contenders to voters clearly did result in much unseemly whining, desperate scrambling, some drop-off in the box office value of Oscar nominations and the expulsion of at least one member from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

But if you ask a number of awards-wars veterans, a general consensus emerges that this year's Oscar race is somewhat more civilized, if therefore less exciting, than the wild and rancorous contests of recent years.

While not necessarily agreeing that this year's campaigns were any less embarrassing than, say, the 2002 season's (when best picture front-runner ``A Beautiful Mind'' was attacked for everything from star Russell Crowe's roughing up of a British award show producer to charges that its schizophrenic subject, John Nash, made anti-Semitic remarks), the academy's executive director Bruce Davis sums up this year's mellower feel rather succinctly.

``With as many things as were going on, I would rather have this than an invasion starting the week of the show,'' Davis says. ``It seems calmer this year.''

Indeed, last year's late March Oscarcast, which received remarkably low ratings even for a show that's been steadily losing viewers since 1998's ``Titanic'' ceremonies, aired at the height of our military move into Iraq. The academy decided to try a month-earlier broadcast this year and next in hopes it could stem the ratings slide, which is attributed to a proliferation of lesser movie award shows like the Golden Globes burning out audience interest in the same handful of films and stars.

According to Davis, the jury on how well this works will be out until tonight's ratings are tallied. And maybe not even then; with an extremely popular movie, ``The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King,'' this year's presumed Oscar front-runner, its fans are expected to tune in in much larger numbers than the academy norm, as was the case in the ``Titanic'' year.

Still, a lot that could have gone really wrong by now appears to have been averted.

``I was most worried about that first round of balloting, where the nominations are determined,'' Davis says. ``We knew we'd have that traditional wave of late-December openings, then the ballots had to be back here in pretty early January. I felt that if members felt that they had to scramble, that they didn't feel comfortable about seeing all of the movies they were intending to see, that, boy, that was going to kill this schedule. Then, of course, we got blindsided by the MPAA with the screener ban, and I thought, that's not gonna help! It was really essential for us that that got rescinded.

``But I can tell you that I have not had a single complaint from an academy member that said this was moving too fast.''

Kicking and screening

At the end of September, the Motion Picture Association of America, the major studios' lobbying organization, issued a member-wide ban on screeners, special DVDs and videos that have been customarily sent to academy and other awards-giving groups' members for more than a decade. The MPAA claimed that such screeners could be used for movie piracy, but many voters - not to mention folks affiliated with studio-owned art house subsidiaries such as Universal's Focus Features and Disney's Miramax Films - saw it as a move by rich studios to put films with lower promotional budgets at a disadvantage in awards races.

Plus, everybody felt entitled to their free home movies, and were not reluctant to scream their heads off about it. The academy eventually cut a deal with the MPAA to allow its members to receive screeners, but only if they signed agreements taking full responsibility for the tapes' whereabouts at all times. When pirated versions of some screener movies issued to actor Carmine Caridi showed up on the Internet, he was stripped of his academy membership. More than a month after the academy/MPAA deal, a New York federal judge declared the screener ban illegal.

But by then, publicists in L.A. and elsewhere had gone into overdrive, setting up a staggering number of private screenings for academy voters to attend. This seems to have gotten most of the smaller films seen on time; the final roster of Oscar nominees looks fairly split between big-studio blockbusters and more modest art movies.

Still, it could be said that non-MPAA signatories, like the truly independent Lions Gate and Newmarket Films, benefited the most from being able to send out home screeners for their films without the restrictions major studios and their dependents had to adhere to. Newmarket earned a surprise best actress nomination for ``Whale Rider's'' Keisha Castle- Hughes, and is expected to win that race tonight for Charlize Theron's ``Monster'' performance. Meanwhile, Lions Gate racked up an unexpected three nominations for its static period piece ``Girl With a Pearl Earring'' and an acting nomination for Alec Baldwin's work in ``The Cooler.''

``I do think that it served us well to get our screeners out into the marketplace before most of the competition,'' notes Lions Gate president Tom Ortenberg. ``But that wasn't really related to the screener ban. We usually take that position because, as an independent, we know that we will never spend as much as our studio competitors or the studio-affiliated independents in award-season marketing. If getting our screeners out a week or two before those others gives us a leg up in getting voters to pay attention to our movies, then we'll do it.''

When they're asked to choose, though, most observers believe that the shorter campaigning season had more of an effect on this year's results than the more divisive screener contretemps. Miramax Films' chief operating officer, Rick Sands, is one of those.

``We believe that the shortened season has forced companies to re-evaluate release dates, to the extent that the shortened season continues,'' says Sands, whose company's main Oscar hope, ``Cold Mountain,'' came out on Christmas Day last year and failed to garner a best picture nomination - leaving Miramax out of that competition for the first time in more than a dozen years. ``We believe that, had 'Cold Mountain' been released earlier, more people would have seen it sooner. We're very happy with (the film's) seven academy nominations, but we still feel that there was less time to focus on certain movies.''

Less-vested commentators attribute ``Mountain's'' poor showing to its quality. But there is no denying that the only December release to make the best picture cut was the undisputed must-see, the ``Lord of the Rings'' trilogy conclusion. In previous years, a general rule of thumb has been that the later a prestige picture's release, the better chance it would have with short-memoried academy voters.

Squeezed from both ends this way, campaign veterans suffered more angst than usual.

``I started drinking more heavily, with more medicinal purpose,'' cracks independent publicist Tony Angellotti, one of the shrewdest Oscar strategists in town. ``You were under the gun to get people to see your film. Psychologically, there was an anxiety surrounding the calendar. You worried about people taking two weeks off over Christmas.''

In recent weeks, however, some people who make a living off of the Oscar race have been fretting about a general lack of tension.

``It will be an ultimate tragedy if this new system takes the suspense out of the race, which is one of the reasons why we love to follow along and play along,'' worries Tom O'Neil, author of the book ``Movie Awards'' and host of the award prediction Web site GoldDerby.com. ``In the past two years, we saw late-breaking surges and upsets by 'The Pianist,' 'Monster's Ball' and 'Training Day.' Those are far less likely this year with the shorter season.''

``It's seemed to cut into the excitement,'' adds Damien Bona, author of the comprehensive and indispensably irreverent ``Inside Oscar'' books. ``In the past, by mid-March, you're sick of it because it seems to have been going on forever. But if you have to spend time with this stuff, at least it should be interesting. Maybe it's just the lack of competitive races; most likely, it's a combination of that and the shortened season.''

All of which is fine with the academy.

``We too used to love the years when there were a number of great horse races,'' AMPAS' Davis says. ``But we've done some audience research which suggests that that's the view of movie nuts. They're gonna watch year-in and year-out, no matter what's going on. But to get the really wide audience, it seems to have more to do with movies that they've seen.''

And that may be this year's biggest change of all - for anyone who still has the illusion, anyway, that Oscars are about artistic excellence and not just a gaudy popularity contest.

Bob Strauss, [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

CAPTION(S):

2 photos

Photo:

(1) Alec Baldwin, left, with William H. Macy, picked up a supporting-actor nomination for his work in ``The Cooler.'' The independent Lions Gate Films, not bound by from major-studio restrictions, was able to send out home screeners.

(2) Charlize Theron is widely predicted to bring home the best-actress Oscar for her role as a serial-killing prostitute in ``Monster.'' The independent releasing company Newmarket Films distributed home screeners for the movie.