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Melissa Leo blows Oscar hopes with ad campaign
The Fighter actress placed ads urging Academy to ‘consider’ her – now it seems that they won’t
With the Oscar votes in and being counted, the talk in Hollywood is that The Fighter actress Melissa Leo may have blown her chances of winning the best supporting actress award thanks to a series of corny adverts taken out in the trade press urging members of the Academy to vote for her.
The ads appeared earlier this month in magazines including Variety and featured some arty pictures of the 50-year-old actress, who also stars in the HBO hit Treme, clad in fake fur with the caption: 'Consider...' She apparently paid for the campaign herself after deciding that she was not getting enough press coverage and failing to land any magazine covers.
Quite why Leo thought she was being under-exposed is unclear. Her performance as Mark Wahlberg's mother has earned her the Critics Choice award, a Golden Globe, and a Screen Actors Guild gong and she was one of the favourites for the Oscar.
But that is no longer the case, with Hollywood gossips united in their opinion that her self-serving campaign went down very badly with the Academy.
When the ads first appeared, she told the New York Times: "This entire awards process to some degree is about pimping yourself out." She also justified herself to Deadline.com, saying: "I had never heard of any actor taking out an ad as themselves and I wanted to give it a shot. All I ask of Hollywood is they consider Melissa Leo. If you want to hire me, give me a shout."
Unfortunately, the Deadline.com article went on to list several actors who had taken out ads in the past - including Diana Ross - and who failed to win an Oscar.
Perhaps realising that her campaign had backfired, Leo appeared to have changed her tune this week. In an interview with the Daily Beast she describes the adverts as "humorous" and claims they were an attempt to "get the movie sold and seen".
She also said that being cast as Wahlberg's mother in The Fighter, when she is only 11 years older than him, was "inappropriate".
If Leo has blotted her copybook, it improves the chances for 14-year-old Hailee Steinfeld, who made an impressive debut in the Coen Brothers' remake of True Grit, and Helena Bonham Carter, who plays Colin Firth’s wife in The King's Speech.
The third potential beneficiary – and the most galling for Leo should she win it – is Amy Adams, her co-star in The Fighter, who actually received better reviews when the film first came out. ·
