A Brief History of Oscar Voting Scandals, From Mary Pickford to Andrea Riseborough

The Academy has finished its investigation into Andrea Riseborough’s surprise nomination for To Leslie, finding “social media and outreach campaigning tactics that caused concern” but no cause to rescind her nomination. Still, the oddity of a bunch of actors copying and pasting support on Twitter is now officially a story for the history books—but it will be in good company since a campaign fracas is nothing new for the 95-year-old Academy. 

Ever since the Academy Awards were established, stars and their influential friends have been wielding whatever power they can to try to sway the results of the awards. Sometimes those actions have been deemed illegal. Generally they were not. And for the most part, it’s hard to tell how many of them were even nefarious. (Harvey Weinstein’s many stunts excluded.) 

While this is in no way comprehensive, here is a brief cheat sheet for the most notorious Oscar campaign scandals of yore. 

1930 – Mary Pickford’s tea party

Want to know how deeply campaign controversies are embedded into the Oscars? Look no further than the second-ever ceremony. Mary Pickford’s first speaking role in Coquette was not well received, but she went on to win best actress on the sheer force of her connections. Pickford was a founding member of the Academy, and when it came time for voting she’s said to have invited the central board of judges over for tea at Pickfair, the estate she shared with her equally influential husband Douglas Fairbanks. At this point, one only needed to sway that five-member committee for a victory, and Pickford’s alleged ploy worked. (As with many things from the early days of Hollywood, it’s hard to separate rumor from reality.) Regardless of how it really happened, the next year the Academy opened up voting to all members. 

By Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

1935 – Bette Davis’s write-in campaign 

Once upon a time, Academy members could write in a winner if their favorite artist didn’t get nominated. The reason for that? Bette Davis, who was snubbed for 1934’s Of Human Bondage. There was such an uproar over Davis’s lack of a nomination that the Academy allowed write-ins. She still lost to Claudette Colbert in the awards juggernaut It Happened One Night, but Davis did come in third in the vote counting, so she made a pretty good show of it. The following year, Warner Brothers used the new rule to their advantage to get the not-actually-nominated Hal Mohr a cinematography win for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. And that was the end of write-in voting.  

1961 – Chill Wills remembers The Alamo

Here’s a good rule of thumb: If you’re going to campaign for your work in a John Wayne movie, don’t piss off John Wayne. Thus is the case of Chill Wills and The Alamo, directed by Wayne. Wills, who got his start by founding the singing group the Avalon Boys before appearing in the likes of Giant, hired a publicist known as W.S. “Bow-Wow” Wojciechowicz after getting nominated for best supporting actor. Bow-Wow went wild and ran a series of ridiculous ads. One named all the Academy members and read: “Win, lose or draw, you’re all my cousins and I love you all.” Another in The Hollywood Reporter, even more crassly, had a picture of the entire cast of the movie with text reading, “We of the ‘Alamo’ cast are praying harder—than the real Texans prayed for their lives in the Alamo—for Chill Wills to win the Oscar as best supporting actor. Cousin Chill’s acting was great. Your Alamo cousins.” The ads didn’t break any particular rules, but they did alienate the one person Wills really needed on his side. John Wayne was not happy and ran a letter in Variety saying as much. “I refrain from using stronger language because I am sure his intentions are not as bad as his taste,” he wrote. Wills lost to Peter Ustinov in Spartacus. 

From Everett Collection.

1973 – Berry Gordy’s ads for Diana Ross

Would Diana Ross in Lady Sings the Blues have beaten Liza Minnelli in Cabaret had Berry Gordy not taken out a barrage of ads in Ross’s favor? It’s hard to say, but the prevailing wisdom is that the intensity of the campaign ultimately hurt her. The Los Angeles Times once explained that the new-to-Hollywood Motown Productions ran nine full-page ads over two and a half weeks all culminating in a final two-page spread that declared, “Diana Ross, an extraordinary actress.” At the time this seemed like overkill—even though now it’s just par for the course—and the question lingered as to whether it doomed Ross. 

1975 – The grassroots support for Liv Ullmann

A bunch of actors advocating for a performance by one of their peers they think is too good to overlook? Sound familiar? No, this isn’t the To Leslie situation. Instead, it’s the time in 1975 that the likes of Gena Rowlands, Joanne Woodward, Liza Minnelli, Elizabeth Taylor, Diahann Caroll, Jane Fonda, and Glenda Jackson all wrote a letter to the Academy asking the organization to change the rules so Liv Ullmann could be eligible for Scenes from a Marriage. Ingmar Bergman’s masterpiece had aired in Sweden as a TV series before it was released in America, which meant that the Oscars didn’t count it. The plea from this illustrious group of ladies didn’t work. Ullmann was nominated for 1976’s Face to Face, however, which was her second nomination after The Emigrants.

From Everett Collection.

1988 – Sally Kirkland’s guerilla campaign 

Sally Kirkland: queen of the guerilla Oscar campaign. The actor pounded the pavement for her own work in Anna as an aging Czech movie star living in New York. She did the talk show circuit, and reportedly sent letters to every member of the Academy. (The To Leslie push did have some of that direct appeal: actor Mary McCormack, wife of the movie’s director Michael Morris, sent a series of emails to voters on behalf of the film.) In a later interview, Kirkland had no regrets: “Gena Rowlands said, ‘I voted for you, Sally, but I have to confess something, I never saw the film, but I wanted you to win so much because of that campaign.’” Did she win? No. She lost to Cher, but she was clearly happy to be there. 

2003 – Robert Wise’s column for Gangs of New York

In truth we could have just filled the story with Harvey Weinstein campaign shenanigans, but who wants to give him that much credit? Instead, we’ll mention one of the more egregious schemes from the Miramax era: the time West Side Story and The Sound of Music director Robert Wise wrote an opinion piece arguing that Martin Scorsese should win best director for Gangs of New York. Wise’s words were then used in a series of FYC ads by Miramax, aimed at combating an earlier editorial by William Goldman calling Gangs of New York a “mess” and saying Scorsese didn’t deserve to win. Except Wise didn’t actually write it. It was written by publicist Murray Weissman, so he claimed, who was also on the Academy’s public relations branch executive committee. 

Other Harvey controversies include: The A Beautiful Mind anti-Semitism charges, and when voters were commanded to award The Imitation Game with “Honor the man. Honor the film.”  

From Mirimax/Everett Collection.

2004 – The Shohreh Aghdashloo “should win” ads

One scandal of yore that has already resurfaced in the Riseborough affair is the brief kerfuffle over an ad placed by DreamWorks supporting Shohreh Aghdashloo’s bid for supporting actress for House of Sand and Fog. The issue was that the ads specifically highlighted articles that said Aghdashloo “should win” over front-runner Renée Zellweger in Cold Mountain. DreamWorks cofounder Jeffrey Katzenberg apologized saying “we made a very bad and ill-advised mistake.” Zellweger still won. 

2010 – The Hurt Locker producer gets banned from the ceremony

These days The Hurt Locker’s Oscar run is mostly remembered for triumph. It was the little film that bested the Avatar juggernaut. But there was a hiccup on the road to that success. One of the film’s producers, Voltage Pictures’ Nicolas Chartier, was banned from attending the ceremony after he emailed Academy members asking them to vote for The Hurt Locker over an unnamed film that was definitely, 100% Avatar. Chartier was determined to have violated the Academy’s policies of directly contacting members and negative campaigns against competing films. So The Hurt Locker may have won, but Chartier was not in the room. (Don’t cry for him: He had a private party.) 

2011 – Melissa Leo’s “Consider” ads 

Were we ever so young as when we saw Melissa Leo, clad in fur, asking us to “consider” her in The Fighter? By the time she put out her ads—which she funded herself and featured no mention of the movie she was in—she was already the presumed best-supporting-actress winner for her unglamorous turn as the relentless Bostonian mother of two boxers in David O. Russell’s film. The ads produced giggles and hand-wringing that she had somehow sabotaged herself. She hadn’t, of course. She was just having fun playing the game, as she told The New York Times: “This entire awards process to some degree is about pimping yourself out,” she explained at the nominees’ lunch. “I’m confident my fans will understand the ads were about showing a different side of myself.”

From Paramount/ Everett Collection.

2014 – The disqualification of “Alone Yet Not Alone”

All of the original song nominees in 2014 were destined to lose to Frozen’s “Let It Go,” but the most obvious underdog was something called “Alone Yet Not Alone” from Alone Yet Not Alone, a faith-based film about the French and Indian War supported by Rick Santorum. The only thing that made it all make sense? The composer of said song, Bruce Broughton, was an executive committee member of the Academy’s music branch. The Academy rescinded the nomination because Broughton had emailed his colleagues in the branch about his work; while they acknowledged he had not broken any specific rules, they said “Broughton’s actions were inconsistent with the Academy’s promotional regulations.” Speaking to Vanity Fair about the rescinded nomination, Broughton says he never got to plead his case to the board: “Eighteen years of service to the Academy, and it was all taken away, bam, through innuendo—not because I broke any rules…. I didn’t ask anybody to vote for it. I just asked them to see it, because I didn’t want to get lost.”