STUDIOS SPEND BIG BUCKS SEEKING OSCAR GOLD.

Byline: Mark Caro Chicago Tribune 

You started keeping tabs over the summer, projecting "Apollo 13" as a legitimate Oscar contender, maybe even "The Bridges of Madison County" (or at least Meryl Streep).

As autumn hit, you assessed other candidates ("Seven"?), and you acquainted yourself with the holiday season players to determine possible front-runners ("Sense and Sensibility") and those appearing to trail the bandwagon ("Casino," "Nixon").

Now, the time to show off your soothsaying abilities has arrived: Academy Award nominations will be announced at 5:30 a.m. Pacific Standard Time on Tuesday. But you still face one significant handicap as you make your predictions. The trick is not deciding what you think should be nominated (heaven forbid!), but rather what you think Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences members think.

Guessing the academy mind-set is tough enough, but you also haven't experienced the annual blitz of videotapes, fancy mailings and other paraphernalia sent to members by the studios in their high-powered campaigns to boost their movies' Oscar chances. So you may not be able to gauge the impact of receiving, say, a "Dead Man Walking" videocassette in a coffin-shaped box or daily mailings in support of "Apollo 13" or a phone call at home to make sure you got your copies of "The Postman" and "Smoke."

"It's been a truly ridiculous year," complained a longtime academy member who has worked on many Oscar campaigns and asked not to be identified for fear of flak from the academy and studios.

Academy members typically say they're not unduly influenced by the studios' attempts to sway them, whether through materials sent to the home or the "For Your Consideration" ads that decorate Hollywood trade publications in December and January.

Still, the studios must figure they're influencing some people, given the hundreds of thousands of dollars they spend just to tout one movie's Oscar chances.

A Universal spokesman says the high end for an Oscar campaign is $1 million. Cynthia Swartz, a Miramax senior vice president running its campaigns, said the studio typically spends $300,000 to $400,000 to promote a film's chances.

The strategy for "The Postman," the most promising of Miramax's Academy Award hopefuls, included sending videocassettes to the academy's 5,043 voting members before Thanksgiving (thus beating the rush of about 50 tapes that each member receives), re-releasing the movie nationwide to raise its profile, and taking out trade-magazine ads to stress that it is ineligible for Best Foreign Language Film because Italy did not nominate it.

Miramax knows the value of Oscar nominations and awards. Over the previous three years, the studio's "The Crying Game," "The Piano" and "Pulp Fiction" snagged nominations for Best Picture and other major categories, and their box-office figures subsequently zoomed.

"The Crying Game," for instance, had grossed a total of $16 million before the nominations were announced; in the following week alone it pulled in $7 million and ultimately earned $63 million.

The Oscar boost for a summer blockbuster like "Apollo 13" - which grossed $172 million and already is out on video - would no doubt be less pronounced than for smaller films still in the theaters. Nevertheless, many academy members consider that movie's campaign to be this year's prime target for a backlash.

"I have never received so much junk mail in my life as I have received from Universal this year," said the veteran academy member and Oscar campaigner. "I'm so mad at Universal, I think, 'Do I really want anything from that studio?' "

Screenwriter-director Tom Mankiewicz ("Dragnet"), another academy member, also expresses puzzlement over the barrage of "Apollo 13" mailings, some of which were oversize versions of print ads. "I don't know what I'm supposed to do with it, put it on my wall?" he said.

One promotional item that many academy members appreciate is the videocassettes, which have become routine for most Oscar hopefuls, despite resistance from the academy itself.

"A movie is made for a big screen, and if you transfer it down to a television set, there is a difference," said Frank H. Lieberman, the Academy Awards' senior publicist.

But Mankiewicz said, "Since I know a lot of people out here who will discuss movies at length that they haven't seen, it's a good thing to actually get the tapes."

In the past, some studios sent tapes and other materials in such lavish packages, including ornate wooden boxes, that the academy sent a memo to the studio heads last August "to discourage the distribution of anything that begins to look like a bribe."

Academy members said this year's packages have been more tasteful, though a few did wonder about the coffin box containing "Dead Man Walking." "If I were (writer-director) Tim Robbins, I would say, 'Hey, we're not dealing with yo-yos and toys; we're dealing with a movie that makes a statement,' " the veteran academy member said.

The studio spins apparently can make a difference. Swartz says she admired the slick campaign for "Leaving Las Vegas," which portrayed the downbeat film as an accessible romance. But one studio's Oscar campaign coordinator, who asked not to be named, theorizes that "Seven" had lost its Oscar buzz because New Line Cinema had not presented the critically respected box-office hit as "anything but a thriller," thus turning off potentially squeamish academy members.