Shakeup at the Oscars

Led by Cheryl Boone Isaacs, its first black president, the Academy tries to solve its diversity problem.
In response to #OscarsSoWhite, some members were shifted to “emeritus status.”Illustration by Golden Cosmos

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences occupies a squat nineteen-seventies building on Wilshire Boulevard, surrounded by car dealerships. On January 14th of last year, Cheryl Boone Isaacs, the Academy’s president, arrived at 2:30 A.M., several hours before she was to announce the eighty-eighth annual Oscar nominations at a press conference. Boone Isaacs, a soft-spoken woman in her sixties, with bangs and chunky glasses, has held her post since 2013. She’d arrived early to get camera-ready and to practice saying the names; the previous year, she had accidentally caused an Internet sensation when she referred to the cinematographer Dick Pope as “Dick Poop.”

The Academy’s first black president and third female president (after Bette Davis and Fay Kanin), Boone Isaacs has presided over a tumultuous era. In 2015, all the acting nominees were white, and the civil-rights drama “Selma” received no nods for its cast or for its director, Ava DuVernay. In response, an activist named April Reign tweeted, “#OscarsSoWhite they asked to touch my hair,” launching a hashtag movement that laid Hollywood’s diversity problems at the Academy’s feet. Boone Isaacs was desperately hoping to avoid a repeat in 2016. As she sat having her makeup done, a staff member gravely handed her the packet containing the list of names. Not only were the acting nominees again all white, but “Straight Outta Compton,” about the gangsta-rap group N.W.A., was noticed only for the work of its white screenwriters, and the “Rocky” sequel “Creed,” which had a black director and star, received a single nomination—for Sylvester Stallone.

Just before 5 A.M., Boone Isaacs took the elevator down to the Academy’s in-house movie theatre, which has a plush red curtain framed by two jumbo statuettes. She and the actor John Krasinski read the names to a crowd of bleary-eyed reporters. A lifelong public-relations professional, she kept her tone upbeat, but, as she told me later, “I just knew it was going to be tough from a P.R. standpoint.” It was. April Reign immediately revived her hashtag, which went viral. Jada Pinkett Smith, whose husband, Will Smith, failed to receive a nomination for “Concussion,” announced on Facebook that she would boycott the ceremony. Spike Lee also vowed to boycott, writing, on Instagram, “40 White Actors In 2 Years And No Flava At All. We Can’t Act?! WTF!!” The following week, at the King Legacy Awards, where Boone Isaacs received the Rosa Parks Humanitarian Award, the actor David Oyelowo (who played Martin Luther King, Jr., in “Selma”) interrupted his prepared remarks to say, “The Academy has a problem.”

That same day, Boone Isaacs released a statement saying that she was “heartbroken and frustrated about the lack of inclusion” and promised “big changes.” Diversity had been feverishly discussed within the Academy since at least 2012, when the Los Angeles Times reported that the nearly six-thousand-person membership was ninety-four per cent white and seventy-seven per cent male, with a median age of sixty-two. (New members need two letters of sponsorship to get in; the annual three-hundred-and-fifty-dollar dues provide admittance to free screenings, which members are expected to attend so that they can make nominations and vote for the awards.) In late 2015, Boone Isaacs announced an initiative called A2020, which had the goal of making the Academy twice as diverse by the end of the decade. When the #OscarsSoWhite fiasco started spinning out of control, she decided to fast-track the project. “It became apparent that doing business as usual wasn’t going to be enough,” she said.

On January 21st, the board of governors met for an emergency session in the Academy’s seventh-floor conference room. The board is made up of three representatives from each of the organization’s seventeen branches. “It’s just like being a member of the P.T.A.,” a screenwriter told me—if your P.T.A. included Tom Hanks and Annette Bening. The board unanimously approved a plan to diversify the voting body quickly by aggressively recruiting new members while shifting others to “emeritus status.” Voting rights would be granted only to members who had been active in the industry in the previous ten years, with the exception of those with credits spanning three decades and anyone who had ever been nominated for an Oscar. In other words, if you had two acting credits in the Eisenhower era, start packing for the ice floe.

News of the plan was met with praise, including from Ava DuVernay, who tweeted, “Shame is a helluva motivator.” But a backlash soon emerged. Since the Academy had not released a list of who would be demoted, old-timers looked at their IMDb pages and panicked. In the days following the announcement, the Hollywood Reporter published a series of guest columns by irate Academy veterans: the director Stephen Verona (“The Lords of Flatbush,” 1974) was “flabbergasted and then outraged”; the producer David Kirkpatrick (“Reds,” 1981; “Terms of Endearment,” 1983) accused the Academy of “exchanging purported racism with ageism”; Patricia Resnick, who wrote the feminist classic “9 to 5” (1980), complained about potentially being “booted into ‘emeritus’ status and replaced by younger members” as a sop to help the Academy deal with its “publicity nightmare.” Resnick believed that the Academy was taking the heat for a problem endemic to the whole industry. “I’d really like to see them use their muscle to push the studios to include more diverse voices,” she told me.

As anyone who has seen “Sunset Boulevard” knows, no anxiety is as pervasive in Hollywood as the fear of obsolescence. “A lot of us felt blindsided,” the visual-effects artist John Van Vliet told me. In the seventies, Van Vliet was drafted out of film school by Industrial Light & Magic, where he worked on “The Empire Strikes Back” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Now sixty-two and semi-retired, he said, “Once you get into your fifties, you’re pretty disposable.” Van Vliet was in the middle of reviewing DVD screeners before casting his Oscar votes, a process he estimated would take a hundred and twenty hours. “The Academy is essentially asking us to give them three weeks of labor, and then they’re going to take our results, put them into a ceremony, and sell it,” he said, referring to the seventy-five million dollars that the organization earns from the television broadcast. “Then they’re turning around and kicking us in the teeth.”

Like Hollywood’s best sagas—“Star Wars,” “The Godfather”—the Oscars often play out as a drama of generational conflict. Daniel Smith-Rowsey, a film historian, has referred to the latest shakeup as “the third purge,” following two previous industry-wide talent overhauls. The first occurred in the twenties, as the rise of talkies swept scores of mugging mustache-twirlers and big-eyed ingénues to the sidelines. This shift coincided with the founding of the Academy, in 1927, by Louis B. Mayer, the head of M-G-M, who hoped to preëmpt the unionization of studio craftsmen by concocting an organization that could mediate labor disputes. The bestowing of “awards of merit” was an afterthought, and in May, 1929, at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, the Academy’s first president, Douglas Fairbanks, dispensed the trophies in fifteen minutes. That year, for the only time, there was a prize for title writing. “The Jazz Singer,” the silent era’s dinosaur-killing asteroid, was given a special prize, as it seemed unfair to put it in competition with the silents. By the next year, the Best Picture contenders were all talkies.

The second purge came in the late sixties, as the studio system was grappling with its own decline and the rise of a youth culture with which it seemed hopelessly out of touch. A generation of stars—the Bing Crosbys and Doris Days—suddenly seemed square and quaint, displaced by a new crop of “ethnic” talents like Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, and Barbra Streisand, while sword-and-sandal epics gave way to New Hollywood hits like “Easy Rider” and “The Graduate.” In 1967, Robert Evans, the thirty-seven-year-old head of Paramount, said, “The strongest period in Hollywood history was in the thirties, when most of the creative people were young. The trouble is that most of them are still around making movies.”

The Academy president, Gregory Peck—hardly an avatar of the counterculture—knew that to stay relevant the Academy would have to bring in more Eve Harringtons and weed out the Margo Channings. In 1970, the year that “Midnight Cowboy” won Best Picture, he sent a letter to members informing them that those who had been “professionally inactive” would be made nonvoting “associates,” the euphemistic precursor to “emeritus.” Out went the director of “Invasion of the Animal People” (1959) and the producer of “Bud Abbott and Lou Costello in Hollywood” (1945), who wrote back cursing the Academy’s “blatant arrogance.” In came voguish young stars like Candice Bergen, who had written to Peck offering to recruit fresh talent and griping that “most members are anachronisms clogging the works of an incredibly facile mechanism called motion pictures.” Soon, she and Peck sponsored Dennis Hopper for membership. He got kicked out two years later for nonpayment of dues.

Today, Hollywood is again trying to appeal to a fractured, anxious country, polarized not by hippies but by identity politics. I asked Boone Isaacs if her initiative did constitute a third purge. “There was never an idea of a large purge,” she said. It was a rainy Thursday, and we were at Spago, the Beverly Hills power-lunch spot. “This is a big industry in a small town,” she said. “Look around the restaurant. See how diverse it is?” There was one other black patron.

She had just returned from a film festival in Dubai, part of an effort to recruit foreign filmmakers to the Academy. She told me that she has always been attracted to what she calls “the international concept.” Born in Springfield, Massachusetts, the youngest daughter of a postal worker, she spent her junior year of college in Copenhagen. At twenty-one, she became a stewardess for Pan Am. She was one of two black women in a class of about thirty. “I had my favorite route, which was to Tokyo, to Hong Kong, to Sydney, to either Fiji or Tahiti, to Hawaii, and then home,” she recalled.

She went into the film business because of her older brother, Ashley, who joined United Artists in the sixties and did marketing for “West Side Story.” By the late seventies, he was the president of distribution and marketing at 20th Century Fox, the highest-ranking black executive in Hollywood. Cheryl followed him to Los Angeles, but, she said, “we decided he wasn’t going to help me.” When people saw her résumé, they assumed she was Pat Boone’s daughter.

In 1977, she was hired to work the press junket for “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” She had no black co-workers. “I said to myself, ‘I’m just going to put my head down and work, and I’ll look up in ten years and see where I am.’ ” In the eighties, she joined Paramount, eventually rising to executive vice-president of worldwide publicity and working on “Forrest Gump” and “Braveheart.” The studio was then run by pioneering female executives like Sherry Lansing, but Boone Isaacs was often the only black person in the room. “I thought I should have been promoted a little faster a couple of times,” she said, but “you didn’t really spend a lot of time talking about the obvious.”

By the time she was elected president of the Academy, a role for which she receives no pay, she was uniquely positioned to tackle the issue of “inclusion.” She told me, “When I first got this gig, people would say to me, ‘You must be overwhelmed.’ I thought, Have you ever used those words with a man?” As a black woman, she said, “I’m always, half-jokingly, saying, ‘I can’t get angry,’ ” but the barrage of grievances about diversity had clearly irked her.

Throughout the spring of 2016, Academy librarians worked overtime scrutinizing older members’ credits, as the board of governors fielded frantic calls from members asking if they were marked for demotion. When the board held its elections last summer, a handful of candidates ran on an anti-reform platform, among them the composer William Goldstein, who railed against the Academy’s response to “false accusations of implied racism.” They all lost, and Boone Isaacs was reëlected—indicating that her critics were louder than they were numerous.

In June, the Academy released a list of six hundred and eighty-three new members—a record number; forty-six per cent of them were female and forty-one per cent were nonwhite, representing fifty-nine different countries. They included the actors John Boyega, America Ferrera, Ice Cube, Idris Elba, Daniel Dae Kim, and Gabrielle Union; the directors Ryan Coogler (“Creed”), Marjane Satrapi, and the Wachowski siblings; and three Wayans brothers, Damon, Marlon, and Keenen. “I think they were just, like, ‘Man, there are six thousand members. We’ve got to put at least two Wayanses in!’ ” Marlon told me. “You want diversity, just go to the Wayans tribe.” As if to rebut charges of ageism, the oldest inductee was the ninety-one-year-old Mexican actor Ignacio López Tarso.

The “purge” ended up affecting less than one per cent of the membership, or about seventy people. The Academy promised that their names would not be disclosed, so that studios would keep sending them screeners. (The Academy, like Skull and Bones, keeps its membership list secret, so studios cobble together spreadsheets of likely Oscar voters.) Few of the emeritus members came forward publicly. I visited one of them, the screenwriter Robert Bassing, at his house, south of La Brea.

Bassing came to Hollywood in 1945, to work as a story analyst for Columbia Pictures. Later, he and his wife, Eileen, co-wrote a screenplay based on her novel “Home Before Dark,” about a woman returning from a mental institution. The movie, starring Jean Simmons, was released in 1958, the year that Bassing was inducted into the Academy. “For about a year, I was the hottest writer in Hollywood,” he recalled. But none of his other screenplays got produced. Eileen died in 1977, and Bassing turned to ghostwriting and public relations. “I got lucky,” he said. “Then I got unlucky.”

In July, Bassing received a letter from the Academy asking for an updated list of credits and informing him brightly that he might “qualify for emeritus status.” Then, in October, he got a second letter: “As of today,” it said, he was converted to “emeritus (non-voting) status.”

Boone Isaacs had told me that the mini-purge had been misunderstood, that it had nothing to do with racial diversity. “It’s more about relevance,” she said—a retrofitted rationale that had done little to quell the outrage. Hearing this explanation, Bassing said, “That’s not nice to say to a ninety-two-year-old person.” He fiddled with his hearing-aid battery. “Because I already know that. I mean, when you’re ninety you’re not relevant. Yes?”

Mother Dolores Hart, who is seventy-eight and the Academy’s only nun, was also shifted to emeritus status. She was inducted in 1960, three years after her film début, in “Loving You,” opposite Elvis Presley, and three years before she forsook Hollywood for the veil. When I visited her, at the Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, Connecticut, she had been dutifully watching her screeners on a laptop during Lectio Divina, the time for “holy reading.” She said she loved “Hacksaw Ridge,” the gory Mel Gibson war drama. When she got the letter from the Academy telling her that this would be her last year as a voting member, she was disappointed. “I’m not going to go down screaming,” she said. “But I think if they cut off too much of the elder community, they’re going to clip the wisdom dimension of the Academy.”

The diversity issue opened up a now familiar dynamic in American life: as marginalized groups attain more influence, others feel resentful. But, much like Presidential politics, the Oscar race is not as simple as voters checking a box; behind the scenes, it is driven by a vast, self-perpetuating machinery. Where Washington has pollsters and K Street lobbyists, awards season has a cottage industry of hired strategists, prognosticators, and bloggers. Politicians kiss babies and eat pork chops on a stick at the Iowa State Fair; Oscar contenders pick at passed sashimi and answer identical questions about their “process.”

“People in the Academy do not vote for people they don’t like,” one self-described “candidate-whisperer” told me. Of the celebrity-petting-zoo events that studios arrange to promote their movies, he said, “You go in there lubricated by the talent and then you get fucked over by the charm.” Some actors (Tom Hanks, Denzel Washington) are known to be charismatic on cue; others (Michael Fassbender, Rooney Mara) can’t hide their distaste for electioneering. Whether campaigning is even effective is an open question. In 2010, when Mo’Nique was nominated in the Best Supporting Actress category for “Precious,” she refused to glad-hand the press and voters at awards-season parties. She won anyway, and said, in her acceptance speech, “I would like to thank the Academy for showing that it can be about the performance and not the politics.” (Later, when her career seemed to stall, she claimed that the industry “blackballed” her for not playing by the rules.) The next year, Melissa Leo (“The Fighter”), annoyed that, as a fifty-year-old woman, she had not been offered any magazine covers, went rogue and paid to place her own “vanity ads” in the trades. She, too, won.

Awards strategists insist that their main job is simply getting voters to see the movie, preferably on a big screen. The Academy’s weighted voting system is complicated—one strategist I met for lunch stacked twenty packets of Sweet’N Low on the table in an attempt to demonstrate how it worked—but, basically, it’s better to have a small, intense base of support than a wider, more tepid one. Voters prefer to watch movies in their living rooms, so you have to lure them out of the house—hence the barrage of screenings attached to luncheons and Q. and A.s with stars.

“I’ve got Ivanka Trump shoes here, Ivanka Trump shoes.”

One Wednesday night in January, Nicole Kidman wafted into the Monkey Bar, in New York, wearing a sleek Louis Vuitton dress with a Peter Pan collar. She was accompanied by an eight-year-old Indian boy in a suit: Sunny Pawar, her co-star in the drama “Lion.” The event was a dinner following a screening, co-hosted by UNICEF and organized by Peggy Siegal, known for her swanky promotional functions targeting cultural “tastemakers.”

For Academy voters, awards season is a roving party that begins before Thanksgiving and extends well past New Year’s. Earlier that day, Paramount had held a luncheon at the Rainbow Room toasting Amy Adams and Martin Scorsese, while Kenneth Lonergan and Casey Affleck, the director and the star of “Manchester by the Sea,” appeared at a tea at “21.”

At the Monkey Bar, a production designer who was part of the Academy’s new class scanned the crowd. “I see the same faces over and over again at these things,” he said. “Like, there’s Tina Louise.”

Louise, who joined the Academy not long after “Gilligan’s Island” ended (she had played Sappho of Lesbos in a 1960 flick called “The Warrior Empress”), sat in a corner booth. She’d just been to a luncheon for Warren Beatty. “I’ve seen everything,” she said. “I’m very impressed with ‘Fences.’ And ‘La La Land.’ And ‘Moonlight.’ ” She thought for a moment. “And ‘Lion.’ Nicole was great. I will nominate her.” She declined to weigh in on the diversity fracas.

The room filled up with more voters, including the veteran actresses Lois Smith and Rutanya Alda, who sat near the night-life columnist Michael Musto. “Tomorrow afternoon is a tea for ‘The Eagle Huntress,’ ” Musto said. “It’s one of the fifteen short-listed documentaries. That’s how specific this gets.” After a sea-bass dinner, the cast sat on stools and answered questions. Kidman talked about the thrill of meeting her character’s real-life counterpart, an Australian woman who adopted an Indian child. Pawar, through a translator, said that his favorite things about the United States were the Statue of Liberty and Disneyland.

In a booth toward the back, the film’s executive producer, Harvey Weinstein, craned his head around to watch. While Oscar campaigning dates back to Mary Pickford (she invited the judges to tea at Pickfair), no one has pursued it with the vigor, ingenuity, and ruthlessness of Weinstein, who, with his brother Bob, ran Miramax from 1979 to 2005. From its Tribeca headquarters, Miramax waged a kind of guerrilla war against the studios, which turned into a full-on arms race after Disney acquired the company, in 1993. The next year, Miramax released “Pulp Fiction,” which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and became the first independent film to make more than a hundred million dollars. In 1995, it lost the Best Picture Oscar to “Forrest Gump,” directed by Robert Zemeckis. That night, at Miramax’s after-party, at Chasen’s, Weinstein told the Observer that he wanted to go to Zemeckis’s lawn and “get medieval.”

To boost his unconventional slate of films, Weinstein turned Oscar campaigning into its own form of stagecraft. For “Il Postino,” the Italian-language film about Pablo Neruda, he mounted poetry readings with Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts. For “The English Patient,” which won Best Picture in 1997, he staged a sold-out evening at New York’s Town Hall, with the novelist Michael Ondaatje reading alongside the film’s director, Anthony Minghella. Other methods were less high-minded: tales circulate of browbeating phone calls to Academy voters and sabotage campaigns against competing movies—tales Weinstein denies.

The Miramax insurgency peaked in 1998, the year that “Shakespeare in Love” was pitted against “Saving Private Ryan”—a contest recalled by both sides as if it were the Spanish Civil War. DreamWorks released the Spielberg war epic in July, and it spent months as the presumptive Best Picture front-runner. When “Shakespeare in Love” came out, in December, Miramax spent an estimated ten million to fifteen million dollars on ads. And things got ugly. Terry Press, who was the head of marketing at DreamWorks, told me, “I started to get calls from journalists who wanted me to know that Harvey had hired a squad of publicists to start a whisper campaign that the only exceptional thing about ‘Ryan’ was the first fifteen minutes.”

Miramax people deny any meddling, and say that “Shakespeare” won Best Picture because Academy voters loved it. (Actors, who make up the Academy’s largest branch, tend to like movies about actors, an advantage enjoyed this year by “La La Land.”) There were counter-smears, mutterings that Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard’s screenplay for “Shakespeare in Love” had lifted from other projects—claims that were later repeated in two lawsuits, which were both settled. But the film’s big win was a mixed bag for Miramax, whose public image had been transformed from renegade to bully. More consequentially, Oscar campaigning had become its own meta story. “The entire Academy process is over-bloated,” a Fox executive lamented in the Times the morning after the ceremony. “It’s like the process of trying to win an election. It’s no longer about the material or the merit.”

The studios now had their backs up. “There was a boomerang effect,” Marcy Granata, then Miramax’s head of publicity, said. “After that, it really became about a ‘playbook.’ ” In 2001, DreamWorks staged a weeklong “road show” for “Gladiator” at a theatre in Century City, with the filmmakers appearing in a nightly Q. and A. The film won Best Picture. Earlier Oscar campaigns had mostly been run by in-house publicists. Now studios increasingly hired freelance strategists to work on everything from advertising to the ground game. One of them was Cheryl Boone Isaacs, who was hired to promote “The Artist” and “The King’s Speech,” both Weinstein Best Picture winners, and both the kind of old-fashioned prestige film that her diversity push might undercut.

In 2009, after “The Dark Knight,” Christopher Nolan’s Batman movie, failed to get a Best Picture nomination, the Academy expanded the number of potential Best Picture nominees from five to ten. Having a hit superhero movie in the mix would have helped ratings for the telecast, and three-quarters of the Academy’s revenue comes from the TV rights, which help fund its library, its educational programs, and the creation of an Academy museum. (The orb-shaped Renzo Piano building, scheduled to open next year, is under construction on L.A.’s Miracle Mile.)

Inevitably, widening the Best Picture category doubled the size of the campaign racket. Many top strategists are Miramax alumni, most prominently Cynthia Swartz, in New York, and Lisa Taback, in L.A.—“the queens of East and West,” as one awards consultant put it. “Spotlight” vs. “The Revenant” was Taback vs. Swartz. This year’s matchup is “La La Land” (Taback) vs. “Moonlight” (Swartz), though Taback is also consulting on “Moonlight,” and Swartz on “Fences.” Strategies from the so-called Weinstein playbook are evident: Lionsgate flew Damien Chazelle, the young director of “La La Land,” to Paris in December to appear alongside veterans of Jacques Demy musicals, to play up his highbrow influences, while August Wilson’s widow has joined the Q. & A. circuit for “Fences.”

Weinstein, who no longer has Disney’s money to throw around, has recently been leaning toward what might be called humanitarian campaigns or, less charitably, P.R. stunts. In 2014, he arranged for the woman who inspired “Philomena” to meet with senators to discuss adoption policy. (She also had a well-publicized meeting with the Pope.) For “The Imitation Game,” he lobbied Parliament to pardon Britons who were charged under the same anti-gay law as Alan Turing. “Now, all the cynics out there might look and say, that was a neat idea to try to pardon 49,000 lives during Oscar season,” Weinstein wrote in a column for the trade Web site Deadline. Last November, with immigration issues in the news, Sunny Pawar had trouble getting a visa to attend the New York première of “Lion”—a red-tape hurdle that Weinstein turned into a headline-grabbing cause célèbre.

The Academy has had to police the increasingly aggressive campaign scene. It’s against the rules to ask for votes explicitly, so strategists tiptoe around the topic: “Did you get the screener?” In 2010, Nicolas Chartier, a producer of “The Hurt Locker,” sent a mass e-mail asking Academy members to vote for his movie and “not the $500-million film,” meaning “Avatar.” He was banned from attending the ceremony, where “The Hurt Locker” won Best Picture. Often, a negative campaign stunt will inspire a new rule. In 2004, DreamWorks placed an ad quoting critics who said that Shohreh Aghdashloo, of “House of Sand and Fog,” “should win” Best Supporting Actress over Renée Zellweger, of Miramax’s “Cold Mountain.” Zellweger won anyway, and the Academy now forbids ads that cast “a derogatory light on a competing film.”

In 2002, someone who wanted to hurt the chances of “A Beautiful Mind” hyped anti-Semitic remarks made by its subject, the schizophrenic mathematician John Nash, in 1967. Nash went on “60 Minutes” to explain that he was hearing voices at the time. In executives’ offices, any rap against a movie or an actor—cost overruns for “The Revenant,” sexual-harassment allegations against Casey Affleck—is attributed to a Machiavellian rival working the grapevine or manipulating a journalist. “You just whisper it to the right person at the New York Times,” one producer explained. “You say, ‘This is what everybody’s saying.’ ”

It’s unclear what the financial rewards are. In 2009, the box-office receipts for “Slumdog Millionaire” shot past a hundred million dollars after it got ten Oscar nominations, but “Frost/Nixon,” which got five nominations, barely squeaked past twenty-five million. The cost of Oscar campaigns can run up to fifteen million dollars, with strategists collecting five-figure bonuses for nominations and wins—enough, in all, to wipe out potential revenue gains. To reduce campaigning now would require unilateral disarmament, but studios are unlikely to stop spending. And what for? “Ego and bragging rights,” Terry Press told me. “It’s a town built on a rock-solid foundation of insecurity.”

Despite the Academy’s push for diversification, actors of a certain age still represent a key voting bloc that strategists must court. When Leonardo DiCaprio starred in “The Aviator,” he dropped in on the Motion Picture & Television Fund retirement home, in Woodland Hills. Each winter, Oscar hopefuls pick up small but significant “honorary awards” at film festivals in Santa Barbara and Palm Springs, campaign stops akin to Hillary Clinton’s stumping at Boca Raton senior communities.

One recent morning in Montecito, Tab Hunter stood beneath a eucalyptus tree and hosed off his muddy fourteen-year-old mare, Harlow, the namesake of the nineteen-thirties star. “She’s a good mare, but she looks like a pig!” Hunter, eighty-five and still brightly handsome, said. When he was discovered, at fourteen, he was working as a stable boy near Griffith Park. Nicknamed the Sigh Guy, he was cast as soldiers and surfers and other icons of wholesome nineteen-fifties masculinity. Warner Bros., where he and James Dean were among the last contract players ever signed, sent him on photo-op “dates” with starlets like Debbie Reynolds, even as he carried on a clandestine affair with Anthony Perkins. He didn’t come out until 2005.

Hunter fed Harlow and drove us to an Italian restaurant, where we sat outside with his partner of thirty-five years, the producer Allan Glaser. The first time Hunter went to the Oscars was in 1956, as Natalie Wood’s date. “There was a style about it that I loved,” he recalled. “Nowadays, people have to be ‘I am who I am, and if you don’t like me the way I am, that’s too bad!’ Bob Hope was brilliant. Now they can’t get an m.c. for the damn thing that’s any good.”

Hunter became an Academy member in 1974, after the Gregory Peck purge, even though he was decidedly non-edgy. “Anybody who had an image like Tab had—the all-American marine, anything like that—there was a backlash,” Glaser said. For a while, Hunter got by on dinner theatre, before having an unlikely comeback spoofing himself in nineteen-eighties camp comedies like “Polyester” and “Lust in the Dust.”

Hunter hadn’t been demoted in the 2016 purge, but, Glaser said, “initially Tab did think that the Academy might boot him out.” He had recently been invited to a screening of Martin Scorsese’s “Silence,” including lunch with Andrew Garfield. At home, he’d been working through a drawerful of screeners, from “Sully” (which he loved) to the Swiss animated film “My Life as a Zucchini.”

Hunter told me that when he heard about the Academy’s response to #OscarsSoWhite, “I said two words: ‘Bull. Shit.’ ” (At the time, he told the Hollywood Reporter, “It’s a thinly veiled ploy to kick out older white contributors, the backbone of the industry.”)

“The thing that gets me,” Glaser added, “is the whole thing started because of Jada Pinkett. I mean, who is she? She’s not a movie star. When she said, ‘Oscars so white, I’m not going,’ I said, ‘O.K., that’s fine.’ ”

Hunter nodded. “In my book, it was an overreaction,” he said. “If there’s no role for a Chinaman, there’s no role for a Chinaman!”

Awards season stretches over more months than anyone has the energy for. “It’s sort of like that line in ‘Elf,’ ” an awards consultant named Tony Angellotti told me. “ ‘We just had a very successful Christmas! Let’s start preparations for next Christmas!’ ” Film festivals get the ball rolling. At Sundance in January of last year, #OscarsSoWhite was still trending when Fox Searchlight paid $17.5 million for “Birth of a Nation,” Nate Parker’s slave-rebellion drama. The film instantly became a front-runner, one that looked as if it could assuage the Academy’s race problem. But the movie’s chances crumbled spectacularly when it was revealed that Parker had been charged with raping a classmate in college. (He was acquitted, but his accuser later killed herself.) The movie bombed. It was followed by a number of quieter films about black lives, notably “Moonlight,” a coming-of-age story about a boy in the Miami projects, which premièred at Telluride in September and received eight Oscar nominations.

After the festivals, the action moves to ancillary groups, such as the National Board of Review and the Screen Actors Guild, each with its own black-tie awards gala. All told, the combined electorate numbers in the tens of thousands. The Golden Globes are akin to the Iowa straw poll, a dubious contest with outsized influence. Its voting body, the often-mocked Hollywood Foreign Press Association, is made up of about ninety entertainment journalists and junketeers from other countries, who expect a measure of wooing. This year, the producers of “Loving,” a film about the Supreme Court case that ended anti-miscegenation laws, sent H.F.P.A. members wedding cakes topped with interracial bride-and-groom figurines. (The movie got two nominations.)

As the Globes ceremony let out, late on January 8th, stars crisscrossed the lobby of the Beverly Hilton, scattering to after-parties like airline passengers racing between terminals. For the nominees, it was the end of a long weekend of mandatory party-hopping, including stops at the BAFTA tea at the Four Seasons (Emma Stone, Ryan Gosling) and the Paramount pre-party at the Chateau Marmont (Meryl Streep, Denzel Washington).

Near the bar, I met a black television writer named Tash Gray, who had no interest in handicapping the awards. “I don’t follow the Oscar race, because they don’t usually give awards to people that look like me,” she said. “The Globes are a little more inclusive.” She spun around and pointed at “Moonlight” ’s Mahershala Ali, a favorite for Best Supporting Actor (and a member of the Academy’s new class), being trailed by a small entourage. He looked tired.

“It’s all a blur,” Ali told me. “There was a stretch there where I hadn’t slept more than three hours a night.”

Strategists divide awards season into “Phase I” and “Phase II”: before and after the Oscar nominations. With sixteen days left in Phase I, the narratives were falling into place: “La La Land” was the escapist fantasy the country sorely needed. Viola Davis, of “Fences,” was an “it’s her turn” shoo-in, especially after Paramount decided to run her in the Supporting Actress category. “Moonlight” was the progressive art-house underdog, “Manchester by the Sea” the bleak film-festival darling. And “Hidden Figures” was the late-breaking hit that could beat “Rogue One” at the box office and expose racism at the same time.

Early on January 24th, Boone Isaacs’s staff greeted her with knowing smiles. The Academy had decided to ditch the traditional early-morning press conference and unveil the nominations via a streaming video montage featuring Brie Larson and Jennifer Hudson. “La La Land” got even more love than anticipated: fourteen nominations, tying the record with “All About Eve” (1950) and “Titanic” (1997). “Lion,” the Weinstein picture, got six nominations. And, for the first time in Oscar history, all four acting categories included black nominees. “It was a very good morning,” Boone Isaacs told me, sounding relieved.

But she emphasized, spinning a bit, that her goal in changing the membership was never to change what got nominated. “Voting is personal,” she told me. “I have no influence over that.” And the envelopes are not yet open: the results on Sunday may set off another round of soul-searching. Even wins don’t necessarily point to sustained progress; the Best Picture Oscar in 2014 went to “12 Years a Slave,” followed by two years of #OscarsSoWhite. Boone Isaacs had seen moments of “inclusion” come and go in Hollywood. In the eighties and nineties, the success of “Do the Right Thing” and “Boyz n the Hood” suggested that viewers were eager to watch more diverse movies. But then the window closed. “It’s just how the wheel moves,” she said.

Soon enough, this year’s nominations produced their own controversy, since they included no female directors or cinematographers. “At some point, we won’t be discussing all of this,” Boone Isaacs said. “We’ll actually be past it. Can you imagine?” ♦