Judging from the overall progress of the awards ceremony, this year's Golden Globe Awards felt more like a direct showdown between The Social Network and The King's Speech, with a strong sense of rivalry between the two. But unlike the results Duke remembered from the Oscars, The Social Network emerged as the biggest winner at the Golden Globes.
The Social Network took home two heavyweight awards: Best Motion Picture – Drama and Best Director, while The King's Speech only saw Colin Firth win Best Actor in a Drama.
This also reflects that the results of the Golden Globes have little influence on the Oscars.
Natalie Portman, Duke's main competitor in this category, took home Best Actress in a Drama. In all the previous precursor awards, she had almost swept the Best Actress category.
However, Duke wasn't anxious. After all, due to its release schedule, Gravity had missed out on nominations for nearly all these awards, so naturally, there was no chance to win.
After the Golden Globe Awards, competition among Hollywood studios and production companies during awards season intensified. Although David Fincher didn't participate in any promotional or PR events, The Social Network's production and distribution company, Sony Columbia Pictures, demonstrated a strong determination to secure several heavyweight awards, ramping up its publicity and lobbying efforts.
Perhaps sensing a threat from Sony Columbia Pictures, The Weinstein Company once again deployed its lethal tactic Harvey and Bob Weinstein hired professional "internet trolls" to smear The Social Network all over town.
The Social Network unfortunately became yet another victim of Harvey Weinstein's bottomless PR strategies.
At this critical moment in the Oscar race, waves of negative commentary surged against The Social Network. First, various individuals associated with "Facebook" stepped forward to accuse the film of fabricating facts and distorting images. Then, the original novel the film was based on was caught in a plagiarism scandal. Moreover, director David Fincher showed no interest in promoting the film and displayed a dismissive attitude toward the Oscars.
On the other hand, Harvey Weinstein packaged The King's Speech as a classy, high-brow production, and the director and cast fully cooperated with Weinstein's meticulously arranged promotional activities.
In fact, compared to The Social Network, which tells the story of an internet entrepreneur with rapid pacing and intense dialogue, The King's Speech conveyed values that were more easily embraced by the Academy's predominantly older white male members.
At the same time, Duke's side never relaxed its PR and promotional efforts either. Activities like private screenings, internal recommendation sessions, and celebrity charity events anything that could directly influence voters kept rolling out.
At the end of January, right before the Oscar nominations were announced, several of Hollywood's major guild awards widely considered indicators of Oscar outcomes released their results.
Unlike the lively, party-like Golden Globes, the guild awards had no formal ceremonies and simply announced their results to the media.
The results shocked many. In the most prestigious categories Screen Actors Guild, Directors Guild, and Producers Guild hot contenders Black Swan and The Social Network walked away empty-handed.
Meanwhile, Gravity, which had previously been snubbed in every major award of the season, became one of the biggest winners. Scarlett Johansson won the SAG Award for Best Actress for her role in the film. Duke received the Directors Guild Award. Weinstein's The King's Speech won SAG's Best Actor and the Producers Guild's Best Picture.
These two films split the four most important guild awards!
Especially the Best Actress and Best Director categories previously dominated throughout the season by Natalie Portman and David Fincher…
The Oscar winds had quietly begun to shift.
In the blue sky dotted with white clouds, golden sunlight streamed through the gaps in the clouds and spilled across the green lawn. It shimmered against a small white ball. Duke stood before the ball and gently swung his putter, sending the white golf ball rolling across the uneven ground. With perfect aim, it dropped into the hole.
"Birdie!"
A middle-aged man's voice rang out from behind. Duke handed the club to the caddy, removed the sun visor from his head, and walked over while smiling, "Just lucky."
A huge parasol stood rather conspicuously on the grass. Harvey Weinstein sat in a chair under the parasol, sipping coffee. He said to Duke, "Skill is the foundation of luck."
Duke didn't respond to the double entendre. He simply shook his head and smiled, then sat down in the chair next to Harvey Weinstein.
Putting down his coffee cup, Harvey waved forward. After the caddy walked off, he finally said, "Duke, thank goodness you're not that interested in the Oscars. Otherwise, I'd have a formidable competitor on my hands."
"Don't worry, Harvey." Duke picked up a coffee cup and poured himself some. Calmly, he said, "My interests and goals lie in commercial films."
After a brief pause, he added, "Also, some of the methods I used this time have already touched the Academy's bottom line. These tricks can be used once, but if used year after year, I don't believe the Academy would sit idly by."
Duke had always been someone who knew how to draw the line, and he wasn't naïve enough to think that having power meant the Oscars would belong to him.
"The entire Weinstein Company is built around the Oscars…" Harvey Weinstein didn't shy away from the topic and said bluntly, "I don't want to become your competitor either."
"We won't be competitors." Duke lifted the coffee cup and took a sip slowly. "Your competitors won't be me."
In fact, most people in Hollywood understood, just as Harvey Weinstein had said, that many of The Weinstein Company's operational strategies were built around the Oscars. This was one of the key reasons why the Weinstein brothers always won at the Oscars.
Similarly, not to mention first-tier companies like Warner Bros. or 20th Century Fox even second-tier companies like New Line Cinema or Lionsgate if their operations were as Oscar-focused as The Weinstein Company's, their performance at the Oscars might not be far behind that of Harvey Weinstein.
Moreover, Duke knew clearly that no individual or company could control the Oscars only influence them. The Weinstein brothers were no exception.
In fact, from certain perspectives, the Oscar crisis of the Weinstein brothers has already begun to show.
In recent years, the films pushed by The Weinstein Company haven't differed much from their previous Oscar-winning entries. The King's Speech was still a byproduct of Weinstein's usual "Oscar-winning formula," practically indistinguishable from earlier films like The Iron Lady.
The "biopic + severe personality flaw + workaholic + historical events" combination, paired with a slightly neurotic acting style from the lead actor, has become a standard "Oscar-nomination-type" film. This has long been the typical production and publicity model for the Weinstein brothers' Oscar campaigns.
There's no doubt that, for the past few years and even earlier, this kind of assembly-line model was one of the safest ways to aim for the Oscars.
However, society is changing, and so is the entire entertainment industry.
With the rise of cable television, Netflix, online media, Amazon, and a host of other new platforms and content producers, the focus of the term "entertainment industry" has increasingly shifted away from "entertainment" and more toward "industry."
The film industry is facing unprecedented competition, and the pressure on Hollywood regarding box office performance now far outweighs concerns about film quality. Genre films and big-budget sequels have become the go-to guarantees of box office success. Major film giants like Warner Bros., Fox, and Universal now dominate the lucrative superhero and YA sci-fi markets, leaving smaller and mid-sized producers with no choice but to focus on content and niche genres to attract specific audiences—betting small for big returns.
As a result, the Academy, already different from the general public, has become even more conservative and niche.
In order to demonstrate that the Oscars are the "Academy Awards" rather than the "People's Choice Awards," the Academy's preference for low-budget, non-profit-oriented art films will inevitably become more and more pronounced.
Because of this, low-budget independent films will likely flourish at the Oscars in the future. And Weinstein's Oscar-nomination projects, which are essentially assembly-line products, will increasingly be rejected by the increasingly conservative Academy and face challenges from competitors with more distinctive qualities. What used to be considered a safe choice will instead begin to look mediocre.
Then there's The Weinstein Company's control over directors and actors. The Weinstein brothers always demanded unconditional cooperation in publicity efforts. For instance, Judi Dench, once tattooed Harvey Weinstein's name on her buttocks as a gesture of gratitude. Even on the red carpet, if Weinstein made a request, she was willing to unbutton her pants to show him the tattoo just to gain publicity.
This kind of absolute control naturally has both advantages and disadvantages. Cooperative actors might gain the coveted statuette, but on the flip side, uncooperative actors and directors would rather stay far away. In an age where individuality is increasingly valued, directors and actors willing to cooperate to such an extent will become fewer and fewer. The Weinstein brothers' Oscar strategy will draw growing resentment.
Although the Weinstein brothers and The Weinstein Company will remain strong contenders for the Oscars in the future, repeating the dominance of the past ten-plus years where they collected Oscar gold as easily as reaching into a bag is all but impossible.
Trying to control people's hearts too much can sometimes backfire.
Especially in recent years, the notion that "the Weinstein brothers control the Oscars" has gradually become a common narrative in the media. Such rumors will only make Oscar voters who already have plenty of money but care deeply about their reputations even more protective of their integrity, and more cautious about voting for films produced by The Weinstein Company.