Katie Rich

I mean, it was definitely like going around and kind of impugning the way that it captured World War Two.

Like, I think it was after that that he got to the point of like publishing negative stories about other films.

Like there was a thing a couple of years later about A Beautiful Mind where they were questioning whether the person Russell Crowe played in the movie was like secretly a Nazi or.

It got really ugly after a while.

But I think Shakespeare in Love was kind of the first seeds of that.

And it was so successful in that he managed to topple this movie that had just seemed like such a guaranteed winner until all of a sudden it wasn't.

And a lot of Weinstein's tactics have kind of made it into the Oscar season groundwater.

Like a lot of people are still doing a lot of the same kind of stuff that he pioneered.

Yeah.

Not in the same bullying way, not with the abusive behavior behind the scenes, obviously.

But he kind of proved you could break this seal of respectability around Oscar campaigning.

And it's never really gone back since then.

Yeah.

Best.

That part is really, really hard because I don't think I ever have loved the Oscars thinking that that is the way that you're going to get the absolute best movie.

Because who's to say what's the best movie?

Like what I think is the best movie of the year is going to be really different from what my parents think.

Or, you know, some of these people who vote in the Academy who are in their 80s and 90s and, you know, have been there for 50 years and have wildly different tastes.

And sometimes that's a problem we get into in Oscar years where kind of the more old school Academy members have a really different idea of what the best movie of the year is.

You throw it back to Brokeback Mountain and Crash, but an even more recent example of that.