Inside the wildest-ever Oscar campaign
Andrea Riseborough's Best Actress campaign doesn't even come close.
The 2023 Academy Awards (“Oscars”) have already generated drama. Who is going to present the Best Actress Oscar since it won’t be Will “Slapper” Smith? Will Austin Butler win for playing yet another rock star with an accent? How did Andrea Riseborough beat out Viola Davis and Danielle Deadwyler for the Best Actress nomination? Well, for Riseborough at least, the answer is by fielding a clever, dubiously allowed, and yet very effective campaign.
Was Riseborough’s campaign for her role in To Leslie unusual? Not exactly. After all, campaigning for the Oscars goes all the way back to 1936 - it only took 7 years from the very first Oscars ceremony in 1929 to see the first ‘For Your Consideration’ ad (for a movie called Ah, Wilderness! and it didn’t work).
But if it feels like we’ve been here before it’s because we have.
In 1987 an actress named Sally Kirkland starred in Anna, a small, indie movie about an aging Czech actress trying to find work while in exile in New York City. The movie was well received and the Los Angeles Times called Kirkland’s performance “a blazing comet.” Almost no one saw the movie, but Kirkland later told The Huffington Post that she knew that the actress who played Anna had a shot at an Oscar. So, as awards season approached, she called up her friends.
Andy Warhol and Joan Rivers had Kirkland on their shows. She cajoled Norman Mailer to see the film and give her a quote. She screened the film for the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. When Shirley MacLaine’s publicist suggested that she go after LA film critics, she wrote every member of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association begging them to see the film (and thus engaging in an early form of influencer marketing).
It worked.
On the way to Oscar night, Kirkland won the Golden Globe for Best Actress - Drama, an Independent Spirit Award, and the Los Angeles Film Critics Award for Best Actress (she tied with Holly Hunter for Broadcast News).
Then she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress.
Kirkland was well aware that this was her moment. In 1980s Hollywood (much like today) there weren’t many meaty roles for women over 40. She was also aware that Anna’s distributor, Vestron Pictures, couldn’t mount a campaign on her behalf. After all, Anna was an indie film that was made for $1 million and earned just $1.2 million at the box office (which is, for the record, forty-four times (44X) what To Leslie has earned and those were 1987 dollars).
So, Kirkland took things into her own hands. She went on every TV show that would book her. She used her own money to hire two press agents, place trade ads, and write a personal letter to every member of the Academy that she knew.
On Oscar night, Sally Kirkland came up short. She lost the award to Cher for Moonstruck, and many consider her reaction to losing as one of the best - if not the most notorious - in Oscar history.
Kirkland never had another bite at the Oscar apple. Anna would prove to be the high water mark of a very long but undistinguished career. While she was nominated only once more for a major award (a Golden Globe in 1992 for Best Actress in a Miniseries or Motion Picture for The Haunted), Kirkland has steadily worked and appeared in more than 250 film and TV roles.
In fact, she’s still working at 81. You can catch Sally Kirkland in this year’s 80 for Brady.
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