There may be hope for Andrea Riseborough to keep her Oscar nomination for To Leslie, considering a similar case that didn’t disqualify another surprising contestant from the past, Shohreh Aghdashloo.
In 2004, the Academy ran a new voting schedule. It had emerged that new rules were being introduced for studio marketers that would take some of the negativity and poignancy out of awards season. But on February 20, 2004, four days before the final date for the Oscars, a print ad in an issue of Daily Variety focused on Shohreh Aghdashloo’s powerful performance in House of Sand and Fog (2003).
The ad used four excerpts from print and television news praising the supporting actress. Three of them called Renee Zellweger “will win” and Aghdashloo “should win”.
Bruce Davis, the Academy’s executive director at the time, called it an “assault display.”
Jeffrey Katzenberg, then head of DreamWorks, and Terry Press, the studio’s head of marketing, both apologized after the audit, with the former telling the Los Angeles Times, “We made a very bad and ill-advised mistake.”
Aghdashloo lost the Oscar to Renee Zellweger for Cold Mountain (2003).
While no formal grievances have been filed regarding Riseborough’s nomination to the academy, sources and insiders have expressed negativity, accusing their camp of violating the academy’s rules on campaigning. Among the possible violations was an Instagram post by the To Leslie account. It cited Richard Roeper’s top 10 films of 2022 that mention Cate Blanchett’s performance in “Tár,” which violates Rule #11, which reads in part: “Any tactic that singles out ‘the competition’ by name or title, is expressly forbidden.” The post has since been removed.
If Riseborough’s campaign breaks Academy rules, the organization could reverse the nomination, which has only been made nine times in Oscars history, but never for an acting performance.
According to sources, the Academy’s Board of Governors is due to meet as early as this Tuesday and put Riseborough’s nomination on the agenda.