No Oscar advertising for Gibson's Passion

[Carrie]

The Guardian (http://film.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,12589,1355080,00.html)
Friday November 19, 2004

Mel Gibson will not spend any money on an Oscar advertising campaign for The Passion of the Christ, preferring to let the film do the talking, his business partner said yesterday.
"At the end of the day, films should be judged on the merits, not on how big your pockets are or how elaborate the campaign is," Gibson's Icon Productions partner Bruce Davey was quoted as saying in Variety.

"You should make your film available for Academy and guild members who might not have seen it during the normal course of release. It should not be a matter of how many times you've seen the ad."

The move is unusual, given that producers and distributors traditionally spend tens of millions of dollars to promote their Oscar contenders each awards season.

Full Story (http://film.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,12589,1355080,00.html)

[sepia]

The last I heard on the F 9/11, Passion of Christ Academy Award dispute was that F 9/11 didn't qualify because it was a documentary, and Passion didn't becuase it was categorized as a foreign language film due to the fact that it used Aramaic, Hevrew, and several other languages--latin I think was one of them. so, technically, each could run in those categories, both neither could go for a best picture award.
IMO, they were just both a bit too controversial, but that is just my opinion.

And I have been paying a lot more attention to this movie, book, etc business since starting all this.

[sepia]

I notice he didn't make it into the foreign language department in the Golden Globes, and apparnetly these are like the first step to the Oscar's.
Personally, I think this film really irritated a number of religious groups--some say it promoted anti-Semitism; and I imagine it went over with the Vatican as well as Dogma and Stigmata did.