On the Oscars campaign trail

Planet Money

NPR

News, Business

4.6 • 30.5K Ratings

🗓️ 8 March 2024

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When you sit down to watch the Oscars, what you are really watching is the final battle in a months-long war of financial engineering and campaign strategy. Because in Hollywood, every year is an election year. A small army of Oscars campaign strategists help studios and streamers deploy tens of millions of dollars to sway Academy voters. And the signs of these campaigns are everywhere — from the endless celebrity appearances on late night TV to the billboards along your daily commute.

On today's show, we hit the Oscars campaign trail to learn how these campaigns got so big in the first place. And we look into why Hollywood is still spending so much chasing gold statues, when the old playbook for how to make money on them is being rewritten.

This episode was hosted by Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi. It was produced by Emma Peaslee and edited by Jess Jiang. It was engineered by Cena Loffredo and fact checked by Sierra Juarez. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This message comes from NPR sponsor Morgan Stanley.
0:03.5	Their award-winning podcast, Access and Opportunity, hosted by Carla Harris,
0:08.4	features entrepreneurs driving change within their communities
0:12.1	and building a more equitable future.
0:14.8	Listen to access and opportunity wherever you find your podcasts.
0:19.2	This is Planet Money from NPR. When I reached journalist Matt Bellany last week,
0:28.0	it was in the final 24 hours of an intensely thought campaign season.
0:32.8	Different factions led by specialized campaign
0:35.1	strategists had just spent the better part of eight months
0:38.6	pushing their candidates through a grueling gauntlet
0:41.6	of stump speeches, fancy gala's, boater outreach events, many of which
0:46.3	Matt had himself attended.
0:48.5	Do you ever think of yourself as a kind of campaign reporter?
0:51.8	Oh, all the time. I am a campaign reporter. Oh all the time. I am a campaign reporter for the
0:56.2	entertainment industry. Matt used to be the editor of the Hollywood reporter these
1:00.3	days he hosts a podcast called The Town.
1:03.0	And yes, the campaigns that we're talking about today,
1:05.8	these are the glitzy glossy campaigns put on by Hollywood movie studios every year
1:11.0	in hopes of winning big at the Academy Awards.
1:14.0	And these campaigns come to a head in the weeks leading up to the ceremony.
1:17.0	And that's where you start to see people doing desperate things,
1:20.0	like taking off all their clothes and floating in a freezing river like Bradley Cooper did for the New York Times magazine.
	...

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