For three years, Harvey Weinstein went without an Academy Award Best Picture nominee to promote. That's like three Decembers in a row where they forget to run How the Grinch Stole Christmas. (Talking to Ramin Setoodeh for Newsweek, Harvey recalls the golden days of early Miramax Oscar campaigns when he would force his way into potential voters' homes to make them watch his movies, and actually says, "I was like Santa Claus. I had all the DVDs, and I'd go to everybody's house, with cookies." Setoodeh fails to ask about reports that anyone who tried to reach for one of Harvey's cookies got a fork stuck in his hand.) This year, Harvey--my apparent inability to refer to this man, who I have never met, as "Weinstein" testifies to his status as a semi-beloved living cartoon character--has a contender in The Reader, the roots of which go back to the days when, as the head of Miramax, he was an Oscar force to be reckoned with, sending out Shakespeare in Love to defeat Saving Private Ryan and somehow wangling a nomination for the fluffy Chocolat. Apparently Harvey read the Bernhard Schlink novel in a single night back in 1997, the year it was first translated into English, while keeping watch over his sick daughter. In the dawn he rose like thunder and and sent one of his minions to Germany to secure the movie rights, with orders that if he failed, he was never to darken Harvey's towels again. The movie had a troubled history that included the deaths of two of its producers, Anthony Minghella and Sydney Pollack. And when it finally opened this past fall, it didn't get the reviews that the filmmakers might have wanted. In fact, it set off a brief exchange of gunfire on-line when a blogger used Manohla Dargis's dismissive New York Times review to accuse her of being insensitive to the plight of ambitious bad movies. And since the nominations were annnounced, Ron Rosenbaum of Slate pondered the question of whether the movie should be given an Oscar in an essay with the ambiguous title, "Don't Give an Oscar to The Reader".
Weinstein laughs off all of this and much, much else. The important thing for him is that he's back, baby, after a dearth of nominations and a few high-profile box-office disappintments (such as Grindhouse) that followed his and his brother Bob's departure from the company they'd created and the establishment of their new base of operations, The Weinstein Company. But when things start swinging Harvey's way, they swing hard: as evidence, consider not just The Reader's nomination, but the fact that Kate Winslet got her Best Actress nomination for that movie, when everyone thought she would get it for her role in Revolutionary Road, which was directed by Winslet's husband, Sam Mendes. Originally, the Weinsteins tried to play it safe, and stay out of Revoltionary Road's way, by nominating Winslet for The Reader in the Supporting Actress category, "But the Academy clearly said, 'You guys are completely full of shit. It's an insult to all the girls in supporting.' This is why I always love the Academy. They're so just at the end." It's true--that lynching party the Academy has dispatched should be showing up at Roberto Benigni's house any minute now.
In the meantime, Harvey remains convinced that his baby has a shot against perceived front-runner Slumdog Millionaire. "What happens is: there are some times when a front runner peaks. All of a sudden people say, "That movie is going to gross $100 million. It's fun, it's won a million prizes, but what else is there?" Milk has done a very good job on their campaign, and is also a very important movie, in my opinion. What could happen, Slumdog and Reader could split. Slumdog and Milk could split, and one of those could get through. With The Reader, lots of Academy members still haven't seen it. I know, it's shocking." Of course, some would argue that the fewer voters have actually seen it, the more that it improves its chances. And now that he's in a position to win his friends Oscar nominations again, Harvey is that much more beloved among people like Judi Dench. "Judi Dench did six movies in a row with me and got five Academy Award nominations. She took me to the Four Seasons restaurant, with Mike Nichols, Carly Simon, Nora Ephron, a bunch of really famous, fun people. It was the day she got her fifth nomination. She said, 'I have a present for you.' She pulled down her pants and she had a tattoo...It's a tattoo you could wash off. 'JUDI LOVES HARVEY', right on the rim of her butt. Everybody at the table is completely shocked. I think she chose it on purpose because she wanted to embarrass me, and she did." Now there's a headline for you: "HARVEY WEINSTEIN CAN'T TAKE JUDI DENCH ANYWHERE."
