Academy Award officials blasted the Wall Street Journal yesterday for scooping tomorrow’s Oscar broadcast with a survey of Academy voters that identified “American Beauty” as Best Picture.
Outside Los Angeles’ Shrine Auditorium yesterday, Academy executive director Bruce Davis likened the Journal’s survey to “a geek … who goes to the movie early” and ruins the ending for everyone else.
He insisted the survey will hurt the show by turning “Hollywood’s biggest night” into a tired re-run — but admitted Academy rules do not bar members from talking to the media.
“We clearly don’t like this at all,” Davis said. “They are trying to take the fun out of this … I think right now the Wall Street Journal is beginning to sense that they have done a geeky thing in the journalism world.”
When told her paper had been called “a geek,” Weekend Journal entertainment editor Amy Stevens shot back, “I imagine we’ve been called worse.”
Other big winners, according to the Journal’s survey of 356 of the 5,607 Oscar voters, will be “American Beauty” director Sam Mendes and actress Hilary Swank, star of “Boys Don’t Cry.”
Supporting actors Michael Caine and Angelina Jolie will receive the coveted naked, bald, gold men tomorrow night, the poll indicated.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the host of Sunday’s 72nd annual Oscar presentation, has been fuming ever since reporters working for the Journal’s Weekend section began calling Oscar voters.
At the time, Academy president Robert Rehme sent a letter to his members, calling the survey “a threat to the Academy Awards process” and “an assault on our privacy.”
Oscar winners are, after all, one of the best-kept secrets in Hollywood, with an accounting firm handling the official tabulations.
And yesterday Rehme and Davis continued their assault on the Journal. Davis told The Post that he gleefully encouraged voters to lie — and feels he was successful.
“Some members told me they deliberately gave misleading information,” Davis said.
If that’s the case, don’t bet on “The Hurricane” star Denzel Washington, who edged Kevin Spacey by only 7 percentage points — a margin the paper called “too close to call.”
Results were more clear in the Best Picture (“Beauty” is a 16-point beast over “The Cider House Rules”), Best Actress (“Boys Don’t Cry,” Swank), and Best Director (Mendes rules “Cider House” director Lasse Hallstrom by 21 points).
Stevens defended the survey — led by reporter Lisa Gubernick — as more than just a poll, but an insight into the way Oscar voters think.
And they don’t always think about quality, if actor Norman Alden’s choice of “The Cider House Rules” over “American Beauty” is any guide.
“I don’t care about bad marriages and fooling around and all these crazy things,” said Alden.
The most shocking aspect of the Journal’s poll was not that comedian Buddy Hackett voted for Caine over 11-year-old Haley Joel Osment from “The Sixth Sense,” but that the one-time Borscht Belt legend is an Oscar voter at all.
He rejected Osment for legitimate artistic reasons.
“In another five years, he’ll have pimples, and no one will want to talk about him,” Hackett said.