Penn and the Oscars

Dissing the group who snubbed him last year, the AFP reports on Penn at a press conference:

“The best way to be honest is to try to emancipate ourselves from the effects of fashion, to try to find what will stay with us forever,” he said in an interview with French daily Le Monde.

“We’ve got to do the opposite of the Academy that gives out the Oscars, where manipulation and very good marketing are rewarded,” said the 47-year-old US actor leading the nine-strong jury who will decide the winning entry on Sunday.

Penn, who won an Oscar for best actor in 2004 for his performance in Clint Eastwood’s drama “Mystic River,” said it had been a very good year for films at Cannes.

He only regretted that “there weren’t a few more comedies in competition” — a wry reference to the predominantly dark fare at the 61st edition of the festival.

Last year’s Oscars were anything but the result of manipulation and marketing. And no film was marketed better than Into the Wild, truth be told, except maybe There Will Be Blood, which wasn’t marketed by the studio so much as by Paul Thomas Anderson himself who kept it quiet early on, got it where it needed and created excitement and mystery around it. The No Country marketing was fairly straight forward and that film would have won no matter what they’d done, as The Departed would have won the previous year. I suppose both campaigns were restrained, as opposed to a shouting campaign but still – Into the Wild got the best marketing around and it didn’t mean squat in the end. Go figure.