The road to Oscar is paved with ... more relentless promotion than ever, say nominees

After a good four months (six for some, eight, nine or even 12 for others), what has come to unironically be called awards season finally climaxes today with the 83rd annual Academy Awards ceremony.

Now that all the consultants, publicists, caterers, hotel operators, publishers, webmasters, hairstylists, cosmetic dentists and thousands of others have made their money off the increasingly industrial effort to win little statues, one more group of enterprising professionals has a chance to cash in: psychiatrists.

The emotional fallout from chasing the ever-expanding number of movie awards - but really just tonight's academy prizes - is bound to catch up with a lot of folks once the races are over.

CUSHY CAMPAIGN TRAIL

What, you may well ask, have talent and producers got to complain about? Parties and banquets are held in their films' honor for weeks on end. They're the subjects of special screenings and Q&A sessions where peers in the academy and craft guilds hang on their every word. They're praised even more elaborately at film festivals in Hollywood, Palm Springs and Santa Barbara, most of which seem to be in business primarily to lavish contenders with loving tributes.

And then there's that tsunami of pre-Oscars awards shows and ceremonies, where the winners are applauded while the also-rans cop loads of attention on red carpets.

Well, for one thing, exhaustion is definitely a hazard.

"I'll say this:

You cannot ---- not ---- be grateful to be part of it," noted "The Fighter" director David O. Russell. "And if you get to be part of it, you've got to step up and do it, it's just the deal. Sometimes it's tiring, but I've never been nominated in these ways before and you never know when it could happen again."

Writer Simon Beaufoy, who worked what could be called the So Cal Network a few years ago for "Slumdog Millionaire" and was at it again this season to promote "127 Hours," noticed how much more intense the campaigning has gotten since he was first nominated, for "The Full Monty," 13 years ago.

"It was a really small scale of events back then," Beaufoy said. "It didn't go on for three months and you didn't go from one event to the next in this great, long line as we do now. It was just a whole lot smaller and more intimate."

So, is the new marathon approach more enjoyable or just tiring?

"It's a bit of both, to be honest," Beaufoy admits. "You kind of bump into the same people every night. It's a strange thing. But it's very hard to complain about your film being recognized by other people because it keeps it out there."

Some talent is complaining, though. The nasty comments of host Ricky Gervais and special honoree Robert De Niro, among others, at this year's Golden Globe Awards was an evident manifestation of that.

Then there was "The Social Network's" Jesse Eisenberg's wry remark at the Academy Awards nominees' luncheon a few weeks back, when he noted that the whole scene reminded him of his adolescence.

"I had to go to bar mitzvahs every weekend, and this is like the same feeling," Eisenberg told a pack of perpetually panting entertainment reporters. "Putting on a suit every weekend to go meet with a lot of Jews."

PERSPECTIVE? IS THAT A NEW AWARDS SHOW?

Beside burnout, another hazard of all this focused attention is ego overinflation - a condition show business people have enough trouble keeping in check to begin with.

"I have zero ego, brother!" actor Jeremy Renner laughed on the morning he was designated the only Oscar nominee from the popular crime film "The Town." "Seriously, I check that stuff every day."

"The best advice my parents and other actors have given me is just have fun with everything and don't take anything too seriously," said 14-year-old Hailee Steinfeld, up for her first Oscar in the supporting category for "True Grit." "So I've taken that advice, and I'm really having a good time."

What of those who worked the So Cal Network for months prior to Jan. 25 and come up empty-handed at the pre-dawn nomination announcements?

"It's such a crapshoot," said an academy member with extensive knowledge of how the campaign game works, who wished not to be identified. "If you're a particularly needy actor and you live your life for adulation - like many do, but not all - it's a killer. And some people recognize that's a possibility, and as a result will do nothing."

Matt Damon, who has a screenplay Oscar for "Good Will Hunting" but didn't receive one of the 10 nominations for the last movie he acted in, "True Grit," is one who sees no point in chasing awards.

"I don't like to do that stuff, and I didn't do it when I was nominated," Damon said. "I would also be curious as to how much it pays off. Ten years ago, a studio executive told me that he needed a commercially difficult movie to be nominated for a best picture Oscar because it meant a $50million swing and the difference between being in the red and being in the black.

"I said, `Oh, there's a quantifiable number?' and he said `Yeah.' But I don't know that that's the case anymore. I mean, how much did `The Hurt Locker' end up making, and it won best picture last year."

WORTH IT?

The answer is about $17 million domestically, most of it well before awards season started. The low-budget film did, however, almost double that gross overseas, and it could be argued that running for and winning Oscars goosed its home video and other ancillary sales.

The truth is, though, that in recent times most contenders and winners made the vast majority of their profits before all the hoopla started. This year is a little different. Rather than, as also has frequently been the case in the past decade, being disdained by general audiences as too arty, serious contenders such as "The King's Speech," "Black Swan," "Fighter" and "True Grit" have done nine-figure grosses or darn near that this winter.

That could be due to Oscar's new, twice as big and supposedly more populist best picture nominee field. But it's just as likely because such would-be holiday blockbusters as "Little Fockers" and "Gulliver's Travels" weren't as popular as expected, so more moviegoers took a chance on good films for a change.

"How much money is being spent chasing these awards?" Damon wondered.

"I wonder what it is now that there are 10 movies instead of just five."

It's been reported that Sony spent $20 million on "Social Network's" awards campaign. Harvey Weinstein, who kind of invented the modern scorched-earth Oscar campaign back when he was pushing Miramax winners "The English Patient," "Shakespeare in Love" and "Chicago," is no doubt spending an equivalent amount to keep his Weinstein Co. front-runner, "The King's Speech," on Hollywood's radar, sonar and chatter screens incessantly.

"Too many people have gotten into their heads that what they have to do is bring their talent to L.A. if they're not working - and pry them out of their contracts if that's what they have to do - camp 'em in a hotel suite for a month to two months and work them," the anonymous academy member observed. "It's not insignificantly expensive, as you can imagine."

Nor, necessarily, as effective as consultants and their clients desperately wish to believe.

"I can't tell you the number of dinners and lunches I was invited to just to meet people who made a movie," marveled Larry Turman, who didn't see anything like this back when he was producing Oscar-caliber movies like "The Graduate" and now chairs USC's Peter Stark Producing Program. "I wonder if it even gets a vote! They all think it does, so everyone has 'em."

In other words, shrinks, when you're trolling for Hollywood clients, don't forget to spam the studio accountants.

PAID TO CARE

And while you're at it, hit up the bean counters at the traditional trade papers, Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, who for decades made their yearly nut from awards season "for your consideration" ads. The teetering publications still do, but now they have to share the promotional dollars pie with a plethora of big but equally struggling mainstream publications, many of which have instituted special sections and websites devoted to microscopically examining the awards races.

And that's not even counting Internet-only outlets.

Hollywood.com and TheWrap.com, the two main industry news sites that have rattled the traditional trades, took on awards-dedicated reporters this year and even published their own glossy, ad-packed magazines aimed exclusively at guild and academy members.

More general-interest film fan sites such as Movie City News and Hollywood-Elsewhere devote acres of digital real estate to awards race coverage and the ads it generates. Then there's the 24/7 awards-obsessive sites that keep popping up, mainly because the studios buy space on them in the delusional hope that some white-haired academy member might drop by and be persuaded to change the mind that was made up 10 minutes into watching "The King's Speech."

Not all of these sites are run by people who think vying for statuettes is the most important thing in the world. A few proprietors are even true cineastes. Treatment for self-loathing may be required.

"Look at the Cannes Film Festival, for instance," Valley Village-based blogger Sasha Stone, who runs awardsdaily.com, suggested. "That's on a different planet from the Oscars. You go there and it's a real love of cinema. Is that a good movie or not? That's what people are talking about, not about whether it will win awards.

"You start to wonder what kind of a game this is," Stone continued. "But the readers that come to my site are so passionately involved in it, you wouldn't believe it. They're so into the contest of it, the winners and the losers, and what it means if this wins or that wins."

Those commenters aren't talent who can understandably capitalize on an industry award (they're too tired to bother). Some, though, could be publicists who get threatened with death, unemployment or (perhaps worse) continued employment with a disappointed client who feels they didn't do everything in the universe to secure that nomination for them.

For the most part, though, they're just regular people with no professional stake whatsoever in the races. They're like sports fans or political junkies, only regarding something that's ideally supposed to be about honoring great art.

"That's the question: Why do you care?" Stone summed up. "What do you think it is? Does it have to do with a weird need for parental acceptance or validation of choices or validation of tastes?"

Sounds like a job for Sigmund Freud. If he were alive today, though, he may not even have become an analyst, but applied his gifts to the glamorous and lucrative trade of awards season consultant instead.

The 83rd Annual Academy Awards

What: Honors for achievements in film take place at the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles; James Franco and Anne Hathaway host.
When: "Oscars Red Carpet" begins at 4 p.m. today, with the awards show at 5:30 p.m.
Where: ABC (Channel 7).

Maggie Gyllenhaal Georgina Grenville Gina Philips Kristen Bell Melissa Rycroft