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. Help support Planet Money and get bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices NPR Privacy Policy
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When I reached journalist Matt Bellany last week, it was in the final 24 hours of an intensely fought campaign season.
Different factions, led by specialized campaign strategists, had just spent the better part of eight months pushing their candidates through a grueling gauntlet of stump speeches, fancy galas, boater outreach events, many of which Matt had himself attended.
Do you ever think of yourself as a kind of campaign reporter?
Oh, all the time.
I am a campaign reporter for the entertainment industry.
Matt used to be the editor of the Hollywood Reporter.
These days he hosts a podcast called the Town.
And yes, the campaigns that we're talking about today.
These are the glitzy, glossy campaigns put on by Hollywood movie studios every year in hopes of winning big at the Academy Awards.
And these campaigns come to a head in the weeks leading up to the ceremony.
That's where you start to see people doing desperate things like taking off all their clothes and floating in a freezing river, like Bradley Cooper did for the New York Times magazine.
Or you see Ryan Gosling climbing the Warner Brothers water tower to take a photo for a trade magazine.
Or you see the border collie from the movie Anatomy of a fall get treated like a celebrity and carted around town and brought to charm voters.
That is a campaign strategy.
Matt says that this time of year, the signs of this massive campaign machinery are all around us.
Like maybe you saw best actress nominee Emma Stone hosting SNL.
Ladies and gentlemen, Emma Stone.