USA Today

Lord of the Rings has tons of it. Mystic River has more than Cold Mountain, but Renee Zellweger, a Cold Mountain co-star, appears to have more than River’s Marcia Gay Harden. Big Fish never quite got it, Master and Commander seems to have lost it, while Seabiscuit is gaining it and Last Samurai never had it.

It’s Oscar buzz, that complex, ephemeral and vague “it” factor that confers upon a movie, actor or director an essential weight and importance, an awards worthiness. Hollywood’s purveyors of buzz are in overdrive.

More than a must-see factor, in politics, the equivalent to buzz might be “presidential” quality. In pop culture it might be the website that’s getting the most hits. In Hollywood, buzz centres on a handful of well-reviewed movies and performances, the ones everyone seems to acknowledge are awards shoo-ins.

Buzz can be capricious

• Johnny Depp’s performance in Pirates of the Caribbean has big buzz, while the blockbuster summer movie does not.

• Sean Penn has best-actor buzz for two films, Mystic River and 21 Grams.

• Fifty-eight-year-old Diane Keaton has significant buzz for her comedic performance in Something’s Gotta Give, while Calendar Girl’s Helen Mirren, another respected 58-year-old, does not. Yet both were nominated for Golden Globes, as were several big stars who are buzz-free where Oscars are concerned, like Kill Bill’s Uma Thurman and Master and Commander’s Russell Crowe.

“Buzz is always important,” says Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences member Mark Johnson, who produced the Oscar winning Rain Man. When you have dozens of movies to watch, “you rank them. There are several movies out there right now that I haven’t seen. Some may be number six or seven on my priority list and that’s based on buzz.”

But this year, buzz has taken on even more importance because of the Oscar season being shorter by a month than previous years, an attempt to boost excitement — and ratings — for the February 29 telecast. That’s a month less time to see the talked-about movies.

This year, movie viewing was hampered by a ban on screener tapes — copies of movies that are sent to Academy members and opinion makers — initiated to crack down on piracy. The ban was lifted in the 11th hour.

Buzz 101: Early start is best

Buzz is more critical in the pre-nomination stage than in the final decision for best picture, most agree. It’s probably the most potent guide in the early process of wading through films and performances designated “for awards consideration.”

For some movies that opened in late December and weren’t available for early screenings, the buzz seems to go up and down.

Miramax executives are concerned about the awards fortunes of Cold Mountain, which got an early boost in the Oscar derby by netting eight Golden Globe nominations, the most of any film. But its director, Anthony Minghella, was shut out of the Directors Guild nominations, considered highly reliable arbiters of who will be nominated for directing Oscars.

There are point people, usually high-level publicists and marketing execs, for whom creating and spinning buzz is their top assignment from November through February.

Buzz basics: Getting ugly helps

• Gorgeous actresses who dress down. Last year, Nicole Kidman donned a prosthetic nose to play Virginia Woolf in The Hours and won best actress. The year before Halle Berry won for her unglamorous performance as a poor single mom in Monster’s Ball. This year, the best-actress buzz is loudest for Charlize Theron, who gained 30 pounds and is virtually unrecognisable as serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster.

• Personal popularity. Hollywood loves Jack Nicholson, hence his dozen nominations and three wins. Ditto for Tom Hanks, who won two years in a row for Philadelphia (1993) and Forrest Gump (1994) and was also nominated for Saving Private Ryan (1998) and Cast Away (2000) This year, sentiment is strong for Pirates’ Johnny Depp.

• Word of mouth sometimes is circulated only among the voting elite.

Take Adrien Brody’s best-actor win for The Pianist last year.

Also, the academy has a tradition of honouring break-out performances of relative unknowns, such as Geoffrey Rush’s in Shine in 1996 and Roberto Benigni in Life is Beautiful in 1998.

When buzz goes bad

Buzz is influenced by timing, a movie hitting at the key moment in the zeitgeist that can catapult it into a pop-culture event. Titanic created some of the biggest buzz in movie history despite mixed reviews, and went on to dash box office records and win 11 Oscars. But buzz can also go wrong. Take the case of Gangs of New York last year. Directed by the acclaimed Martin Scorsese (who has never won an Oscar), it got 10 Oscar nominations, but won nothing.