A few items kind of blended into one another this morning as I sat down to write.  Ellen Goodman, a columnist about whom I have always had mixed emotions, wrote a piece looking back (all of three days later) on the alleged smear campaign against A Beautiful Mind.  Her point – that Hollywood operates on a different standard than much of the rest of the world.  Regardless of the smears, this film won a Best Picture Oscar despite an unquestionable avoidance of the whole truth of the story.  Meanwhile, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s reputation is in tatters for far less.  (You can read the column here.

And while I don’t necessarily agree with overall tone of the piece, suggesting a sort of immorality in “our” way of dealing with reality, she is right.  Hollywood is different.  The rules are different.  From one side of our mouths, we rage about unfairness at the Oscars and promote the event as though the group of voters deserves a level of respect above and beyond all other moviegoers.  One reader, who will appear in ROTD below, made the argument that Moulin Rouge’s failure to win Best Picture was an indictment of the film’s quality.  This, of course, begs the question, why was it nominated if the Academy didn’t really like it?  I keep reading about “The Academy did this…” and “The Academy did that…” as though The Academy was a jury, sitting and debating about Russell Crowe’s barroom behavior or whether it was payback time for Black America.  The Academy is a bunch of individuals, most of who will chat socially with less than 1 percent of the other voters about their votes.  Box office and the willingness of studios to pay for campaigns are still far more influential on nominations and final votes than any of these petty gripes that go on year after year.  Drudge dropped a small explosive on A Beautiful Mind.  Universal let voters know that they should consider whether that bomb was really just someone trying to manipulate the vote.  And that was all that mattered.  We in the media kept this absurdity alive for weeks longer than necessary by any journalistic accounting. 

But “our” rules are different.  We work as reporters in an industry that is obsessed with control.  Studios and individual talent alike love “inside” coverage when it works for them.  And when it works against them, watch out!  Just a couple of weeks ago, at DreamWorks summer preview event, publicity chief Terry Press opened by saying something to effect of, “We could all bore you with carefully written speeches about how wonderful things are or we can all relax and tell the truth.  Some of you – and you know who you are – will make something unpleasant out of this.  So this evening, for now, is off-the-record.” 

How long would people have kept everything off the record had anyone said anything really good?  Well, someone would have leaked whatever it was to someone who wasn’t there.  And that’s exactly what happened last weekend, when someone gave Nikki Finke the blow-by-blow of one of the parody sketches performed by Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Katzenberg and in the role on Universal movie queen Stacey Snider, Christine Applegate, with a special appearance by Hugh Jackman as The Male Assistant.  (you can read Ms. Finke’s account by clicking here.)

The question I keep wondering about is… is this news?  Do these insiders deserve the privacy that they asked for and were afforded by the dozens of journalists in attendance?  It’s the ongoing dichotomy of covering this business.  It’s the Harry Knowles question, writ large.  Despite the excessive security precautions currently in vogue at most studios (“They blew up the WB water tower… the horror… the horror…”), access to events and information in this business is not akin to getting inside dope out of the Oval Office. 

Hollywood, for all the backbiting, lives by its own freaky set of rules.  The good folks at Universal have an idea of who they think is behind the ABM attack… but they chose to keep that private, establishing the threat of mutual assured destruction lest anyone go that route again next year.  No one from behind the scenes wants to be in front of the camera in anything less than a completely controlled setting.  Spielberg and Geffen would never tell Jeffrey K. that he couldn’t do a skit at the Miramax party… until it ended up in Salon.  Maybe they won’t be upset about it.  Maybe they will realize that less than one percent of their target audience will ever read about the skit and that less than twenty percent of that less than one percent will be surprised by any of the “revelations” to be found there.  More likely, they will be worried about the only people who matter in this kind of exposure… the people who were mentioned in the skit.  And again, Barry Diller would have heard about the skit from other insiders who were in attendance.  He may or may not have had a sense of humor about it.  But reading about it in Salon takes it to a whole new level. 

Does Nikki Finke have the right to run this story?  Absolutely?  Is she (or Salon) under any obligation, given that she was not invited to the event and therefore made no agreement, to keep it off the record?  Nope.  But is there an invasion of privacy here?  Yes.  And will the appearance of this article have a chilling effect on next year’s party… even if it wasn’t a fellow journalist who leaked the story to Nikki?  Probably. 

Finke has been on a bit of tear since being fired by The New York Post and realigning with Salon.com.  Last Saturday, she delivered two pieces, both taking on The Academy head-on.  A Oscar prediction piece was sub-headed “Oscar voters are cranky score-settlers.”  I have some real issues with her presumptions and attitude in the piece. However, she is the only writer I know of who called Jim Broadbent, hitting on six out of the six top awards.

Likewise, her other story, sub-headed “The Academy Awards have grown sloppy and corrupt,” is a bit over the edge.  Firstly, it assumes that anyone outside of Hollywood cares that the Oscar race has become excessive and less and less profitable for all involved.  The public cares as much about “the smear campaign” as it does that The Golden Globes has fewer voters than my graduating class at prep school and that the only voters with names that any American moviegoer could recognize are professional quoters.  Oscar doesn’t need to be cleaned up.  If we were to take it literally, the whole illusion that the awards are definitive arbiters of taste would vanish and the value of the awards with it. 

I have no problem with speculation or opinion… obviously.  (Salon offers another strong opinion about Oscar from Cintra Wilson here and some of the letters in response here.  And pieces by The New York Observer’s Jason Gay and The Village Voice’s J Hoberman are worth the read.  But my point was… I get a little antsy when writers cross that line between their opinion and reportage. 

And then, there is the flip side of all of this.  Finke was fired from the New York Post after being accused of stretching the truth in an article about Disney and a lawsuit over the rights to Winnie The Pooh.  I have no opinion about those articles because I can’t read them… the Post has removed them from their website.  But what seems clear is that Disney pushed the Post and with it, parent company News Corp aka Fox, to fire Finke for allegedly crossing that line.  Finke and her lawyers claim that News Corp bent to Disney’s will because they are important business partners.  But I don’t buy that for a second.  Rupert Murdoch has used the Post to shred Disney for years.  One of the business connections cited by Finke’s lawyers, the Disney purchase of Fox Family Channel, has already been put in perspective by Murdoch’s on-the-record giddiness about the exchange and how he screwed Disney on the deal. 

An what really put Disney on the war path, Finke’s copy or the wild headlines, which from what I know of the Post’s editorial methods, were not in Finke’s control in any way?  (Ironically, New Times Los Angeles ran a cover story on the same subject last week, written by staffer Susan Goldsmith, featuring Mickey Mouse dumping files into a shredder.  As far as I know, no one has been threatened yet.  But reading the story, the shredding was hardly the key… but it certainly was inflammatory… which is still legal in America.)  But how can Disney take on the entire paper?  They really can’t.  So Finke goes, whether the accusations are reasonable or not.  It doesn’t take a conspiracy.  Again, house rules.

The firestorm over Finke’s firing has raged on in the columns of some of America’s best media reporters.  Cynthia Cotts at the Village Voice wrote about it last week.  So did The American Reporter. And The L.A. Examiner is keeping up with the whole thing, blow by blow. 

In the meanwhile, I keep reexamining the rules.  Do the ends justify the means?  Is anything fair game so long as someone wants to read it?  And what about the trees that make up the forest?  What should we demand of ourselves?  Do we really get to make up our own rules?  Can we really compare ourselves to the journalists who cover politics to the economy?  And as Roger Ebert rightly pointed out when the L.A. Times questioned whether the appearance of a conflict of interest that comes from being on a Disney produced show that reviews Disney produced movies, how many of us claim perfect purity anymore… especially as we become more and more successful? 

It is a quandary.

READERS OF THE DAY:  Fast Jonny continues to slam Moulin Rouge:  “Ouch!  Slapped silly by the Button in defense of the fat and happy Moulin Rouge...but at the risk of absorbing further Hot Button abuse, please consider:

1. Whoopi said it best..."Moulin Rouge accomplished (something or other) apparently without a director."  I agree.  So did the Acadamy.

2. This was not a musical by any definition -- contemporary light opera maybe (which is exactly what a music video is), but not a musical.

3. The votes have been tallied, and it's official -- gimmickry does not equal artistry.

4. Moulin Rouge is not a treasure.  What it is is a series of stupid post-production tricks mugging as art.  It's a movie that fails by passing off fortune cookie-style homilies (“Truth. Beauty. Freedom. Love. Above All,

Love.” -- very deep -- wasn't that almost the opening to the Superman TV series?) as real thematic elements that are explored over the course of a story's unfolding instead of becoming the story itself.

What Moulin Rouge might have had going for it is the fact that in the land of the bland, the one-trick movie is king.

But it's only my opinion...and the Acadamy's vote...we could all be wrong. I cower as I await the Hot Button's retribution.”

DAVID RESPONDS, AGAIN:  I disagree.

The Pizza Man answers yesterday’s E ME question,  "What haven't I been writing about that really, really, really needs to be written about?": 

I'd be interested to get your take on the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA), introduced earlier this month by Senate Commerce Chairman Ernest 'Fritz' Hollings and backed by the MPAA.

Not satisfied with the $35 billion given them annually by Americans, not content with the lengthening of copyright terms by 1000%, nor at all shamed by their precious Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) suppressing free speech and fair-use rights, the MPAA and Chief Executive Luddite Jack Valenti are now hell-bent on castrating all our computers too.

Apparently, the MPAA believes the best way to stop movie piracy is to treat every customer like a pirate.  Remember when your Kindergarten teacher would punish the whole class because one kid misbehaved during recess?  Well, that's the gist of the MPAA's grand copyright-protection strategy:  We're all wicked, thieving children, not to be trusted with the DVDs and VHS-tapes that we buy and pay for.

It's not enough for Jack-in-the-box Valenti (who was awarded $1.15 million for servicing the MPAA in 2000) that the DMCA has effectively criminalized the very possibility of a copyright violation -- as opposed to actually committing one.  Now Valenti has recruited Senator Fritz Hollings (Democrat - Disney/South Carolina), who has received almost $300,000 in funding from generous Hollywood since 1997, to do a little more legislative dirty work.

If Hollywood has its way, the CBDTPA will hamstring nearly every electronic device known to man (PCs, TVs, DVD players, VCRs, stereos, PDAs, radios, cell phones, alarm clocks, etc.) with federally mandated copy-protection circuitry.  Any technology created, sold or distributed without the proper copy-protection controls will be made illegal.  Naturally, removing any such copy-protection will also be prohibited -- with civil penalties of up to $25,000 per violation, and the door left wide open for federal felony charges too.

It's my opinion that the CBDTPA (along with the DMCA, Mr. Valenti, Sen. Hollings and their Hollywood/Washington cronies) all suck eggs.  What's yours?"

E ME:  Tomorrow, I will answer that… but in the meantime, what are yours?