Did you hear about the brouhaha over a Hurt Locker producer dissing Avatar? Oh, it's quite a fracas, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is taking it very seriously. Seems Nicolas Chartier sent an e-mail to friends and colleagues in the Academy on Feb. 19, basically pleading with them to vote for Hurt Locker for Best Picture. But he also made a reference to Avatar, violating Academy rules against "casting a negative or derogatory light on a competing film." Consequently, Chartier has been banned from attending the Oscars on Sunday. If Hurt Locker wins, the other three producers will take the stage to accept the award, while Chartier will have to pick up his trophy later, in shame.

Tough break, but that's what you get for running a negative campaign, right? That's what I thought, too, until I read the e-mail. Here it is, as posted by Pete Hammond at the L.A. Times. (The odd usage and grammatical errors were in the original and are explained by Chartier being French.)
I hope all is well with you. I just wanted to write you and say I hope you liked Hurt Locker and if you did and want us to win, please tell (name deleted) and your friends who vote for the Oscars, tell actors, directors, crew members, art directors, special effects people, if everyone tells one or two of their friends, we will win and not a $500M film, we need independent movies to win like the movies you and I do, so if you believe The Hurt Locker is the best movie of 2010, help us!

I'm sure you know plenty of people you've worked with who are academy members whethere a publicist, a writer, a sound engineer, please take 5 minutes and contact them. Please call one or two persons, everything will help!

best regards,
Nicolas Chartier Voltage Pictures



Now, this is clearly lame and unprofessional and desperate and embarrassing. But did you catch the part where he cast "a negative or derogatory light on a competing film"? Me either. He obviously meant Avatar when he said he didn't want "a $500M film" to win, referring to its huge, studio-backed budget. But how is that negative or derogatory toward Avatar? I'm pretty sure the Avatar people are on the record admitting their movie cost a lot of money. All Chartier really said was that he wants his own film to win -- which, you know, duh. The only "disparaging" thing he said about Avatar was that he hopes it loses, which is sort of implied by his desire for Hurt Locker to win.

And that's it? That's the brouhaha? That's no brouhaha! Why, that's barely a fracas! It's certainly no melee, tumult, skirmish, or donnybrook. A guy who co-produced one movie urged people to vote for it over the others. What was he supposed to do say? "I hope there's a ten-way tie and we ALL win!"?

Yet even before the Academy put Chartier on the no-fly list for the Oscars -- and this is the first time anyone can remember the Academy banning a specific person, let alone a nominee -- Chartier's Hurt Locker teammates were distancing themselves from his terrible, terrible comments. Screenwriter Mark Boal told Nicole LaPorte at The Daily Beast that director Kathryn Bigelow "was shocked and appalled and embarrassed by Nick's poor judgment, and condemned it." Chartier himself released a statement apologizing for the e-mail.

Come on, people. This is NOTHING. Remember when Harvey Weinstein would use his clout -- remember when Harvey Weinstein had clout? -- to do things like get Shakespeare in Love a Best Picture trophy by allegedly (ahem) smearing Saving Private Ryan? Remember when A Beautiful Mind was plagued with an endless barrage of stories questioning its veracity, even though it never claimed to be a documentary in the first place? Matt Damon recently told the New York Times that when he and Ben Affleck were up for a screenplay Oscar for Good Will Hunting, a story went around claiming someone else had actually written it. Damon's people traced the rumor to the people behind As Good As It Gets, which was competing for the same prize.

Chartier's lesson here should be that if you want to smear the competition, you have to do it right. You can't send an e-mail to everyone in your address book making a passing reference to an expensive fellow nominee. You have to do it privately, secretly, and use a lot of innuendo rather than straightforward statements. The L.A. Times' weaselly story last week questioning Hurt Locker's authenticity is more like it: Wait until a few days before Oscar ballots are due (rather than, say, when the movie came out, eight months ago), then run an article citing a few people who take issue with the film's depiction of soldiers. Make sure to mention that, oh yeah, the majority of military experts who've commented have praised it, but keep the headline and the bulk of the story negative. Why? To cast just a little bit of doubt in voters' minds without coming right out and saying, "You shouldn't vote for this movie."

Maybe the reason the Chartier thing became such a big deal is that this has been a very placid awards season. For crying out loud, Katheryn Bigelow and James Cameron are ex-spouses -- this should be the battle of the century! -- and yet they've been nothing but nice to each other. Weinstein does goofy things like insist Inglourious Basterds is going to win Best Picture, but you can tell his heart's not in it. He's barely even trying to run smear campaigns anymore. Lacking anything of substance, we're forced to make a mountain out of the Chartier molehill. What, there isn't enough drama in the movies themselves?