It was the night before Valentine’s Day in 1995, and Jennifer Tilly was sitting in a hotel room, feeling a strange electrical charge in the air.
The Oscar nominations would be announced the following morning, and Tilly had no reason to be optimistic. The actress had earned glowing reviews from critics for her robust comedic performance in “Bullets Over Broadway,” which opened in theaters 30 years ago this week. But it was her co-star Dianne Wiest who had swept the critics awards and won the Golden Globe and was a lock to receive a nomination.
And though Tilly had eagerly promoted her own work in the film – read on to find all about the unique strategy of her campaign – she had not garnered a single precursor citation anywhere and was considered a long shot, generously speaking. According to the pundits, only one film would net two Best Supporting Actress nominations that year: “Forrest Gump,” for Sally Field and Robin Wright, who’d both scored Screen Actors Guild nods.
Then Tilly received a phone call from the unit publicist for the small movie she was working on in Vancouver that winter. “I’ve made sure both of my fax lines are working,” the publicist excitedly told her. “Because it’s going to be a big day for you tomorrow with the Oscar nominations!”
“Oh, it was so sweet of her,” Tilly told TheWrap on a recent Zoom interview. “This funny little out-of-touch Canadian publicist thinks I’m going to get an Oscar nomination.”
But something about the publicist’s zeal gave Tilly’s confidence an inconceivable boost. “I hung up the phone and literally the molecules in the room tilted a little,” Tilly said. “And I thought, ‘Could it – is this maybe going to happen?’ I had a weird feeling, for the first time, that it was possible.”
That small atomic shift in belief was the culmination of a career navigation that began years earlier. Speaking with Tilly, you quickly notice that she’s both movie smart (side conversations range from the works of Mike Leigh to Bernardo Bertolucci to Demi Moore) and industry smart. After appearances on TV shows “Hill Street Blues” and “Cheers” in the 1980s, she relocated to New York in the early ’90s and took roles in the theater. Her goal: Get noticed by Juliet Taylor (an Honorary Oscar recipient this year), the casting director for Woody Allen.
It worked. She landed an audition for the role of Olive in “Bullets Over Broadway” and improvised her way through the 12 pages of dialogue she’d been handed. In the movie, about the making of a play in 1920s New York, Olive is a woefully bad actress, who’s also the girlfriend of the play’s financial backer, a mean-faced mobster. (Olive’s demise near the story’s end still ranks as one of the boldest plot twists in any modern comedy.)
For Tilly, improvising in her audition was a risk that paid off. Allen and his collaborators (his co-writer was the late Douglas McGrath) loved her spontaneous energy. She won the role and was even given free range to go off script during filming, including for a scene, ironically, about the art of ad-libbing and also during this sequence, where she inserted the words “charmed, charmed” into the dialogue.
“Bullets Over Broadway” was released by Miramax Films, headed by Harvey Weinstein, who in 1994 was known for his aggressive Academy Award campaigns. This was a couple decades before his criminal convictions and life imprisonment. And when the movie was released, Tilly was excited to be part of her first awards blitz.
“But then I was sitting on the plane next to a guy who worked in the industry,” Tilly said. “He told me, ‘I just came from a meeting with Miramax and they have a list of people they are going to push for Academy Awards this year. You are not on that list.’”
To Tilly, it was obvious that Miramax (“Harvey being so clever,” she grinned) had concurred that Wiest was a lock to be nominated and even win. Tilly’s presence in the category, causing a potential vote-split, would only endanger Wiest’s chances for victory. Wiest had won the category six years earlier for “Hannah and Her Sisters,” without any competition from her co-stars in that film.
For the Golden Globes and SAG Awards, Tilly asserted that her name was never even entered for consideration. “For those awards, you have to be submitted,” she said. “However, that’s not the case with the Academy Awards. It’s not a closed shop. It’s a private ballot and the voters sit down and decide for themselves who the best performances are.”
And so she figured, why not hit the campaign trail?
As the Oscar nomination voting period was about to commence, her first whistle stop was “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno.”
“They used to really like me on the talk shows because I’m so chatty, as you can tell,” she said. “So in this moment, I saw going on Leno as a tremendous opportunity.” Shrewdly, she agreed to appear on the show only on the condition that Leno would use the phrase “Oscar buzz” as he introduced her on stage.
“So I was standing in the wings and I heard Jay Leno go, ‘My next guest has Oscar buzz around her performance.’ And I thought, smugly, ‘Well, she does now.’”
After that, Tilly said yes to any entertainment talk show that would have her and also spent her own money for several For Your Consideration ads in industry trade papers. She opted for the black-and-white photos, which were the cheaper option ($400 for a full page, she recalled). “And then I slapped the Miramax logo in the corner, so it looked as if Miramax had paid for them.”
Then, shortly after five o’clock in the morning on Feb. 14, 1995, she watched as her name was announced as a nominee for the 67th Academy Awards.
“I just thought, ‘Oh my God,’” Tilly said. “I called my personal publicist and she said, ‘Jennifer, are you sure?’ She had been asleep. She said, ‘Did someone from the [publicity] firm confirm it with you?’ I told her, ‘I just saw the nominations announcement live on TV!’ She said, ‘Oh, I guess it must be true.’”
Meanwhile, the unit publicist in Vancouver, who had boosted Tilly’s confidence the previous evening, swiftly arranged an interview with “Entertainment Tonight.”
Wiest, of course, was also nominated. Despite 13 nominations for “Forrest Gump,” the two favored supporting actresses, Field and Wright, had both been snubbed. As had 12-year-old Kirsten Dunst, a Golden Globe nominee that year for “Interview With the Vampire.”
“I felt terrible because Kirsten Dunst was also in Vancouver at that time, filming ‘Little Women,’” Tilly said. “And we were in the elevator together with her mom and I was shrinking against the wall because I thought they were probably like, ‘There’s that one that stole Kirsten’s nomination.’ I did feel a little survivor’s guilt.”
Tilly’s nomination also carried historical significance. Jennifer and her younger sister, Meg, nominated for 1985’s “Agnes of God,” became only the third pair of sisters to receive acting noms. “We joined a list along with those two sisters who hated each other,” Tilly said. “I always thought we kind of looked like Joan Fontaine and Olivia de Havilland – in case Ryan Murphy is thinking about casting a new ‘Feud’ thing.”
Congratulatory calls came her way, but Tilly also took note of who she didn’t hear from. “I got flowers from everybody I knew, but no flowers from Miramax. A friend of my publicist was working for Harvey Weinstein, and after two weeks she said, ‘I think it’s terrible you guys didn’t send Jennifer any flowers.’ And he goes, ‘So send her a scarf or something.’” (The studio did capitulate, sending Tilly a “medium-sized bouquet” two weeks later, she added.)
Tilly fondly remembered a conversation with Dick Guttman, who then was the head of the public relations firm where she was a client. He called while she was still in Vancouver and told Tilly that when one is nominated for an Oscar, there are two reasons to do publicity.
“He goes, ‘The first reason is to win the award. And let’s face it, that’s not going to happen. But the second reason is to make sure nobody ever forgets that you were nominated for an Oscar.’ He said, ‘I think we should try for the latter.’”
Tilly took his advice in stride. Especially in terms of how the nomination afforded her more face time with fellow creative people.
“I knew how to duck in and duck out,” she said. “When I met someone in the industry, I had 37 seconds to make my point. But after I became an Oscar nominee, the parameters had expanded and now 37 seconds had increased to three minutes. There’s validation that comes with it. Of course, I knew it was something that could go away within a year. So I really enjoyed myself.”
That enjoyment extended to the ceremony itself, where Tilly arrived early to be interviewed by every outlet. One member of the media told her, “If you’d come a few minutes earlier, you could have helped us set up the camera.”
She was serene, unaffected by any knots of anxiety. Wiest, her co-star, was heavily favored to scoop the award. And when she did, Tilly smiled and applauded from her seat on the aisle.
“Everybody knew Dianne was going to win, unless there was somebody backstage handing the wrong envelope to the presenter,” Tilly said. “But I was in the room where it happens, as they say in ‘Hamilton,’ where is where I always wanted to be. I was very happy, genuinely, when Dianne made a lovely, gracious reference to me in her speech. It was a beautiful night with wonderful memories.”
At Miramax’s Oscars afterparty, Tilly finally stood face to face with the one person who had been more surprised by her Oscar nomination than she was.
“Harvey Weinstein came up to me,” she said. “I assumed that he was annoyed that I tried to split the vote. Or maybe I just wasn’t his type, being 36 at the time and a lot older than the average starlet. But he said to me, ‘Congratulations, you accomplished exactly what you set out to do.’ When it was all over, I think he had a begrudging admiration for my publicity tactics.”
Other great roles followed in the wake of Tilly’s Oscar experience, including in the Wachowski’s “Bound,” “Liar Liar,” “Family Guy” and the long-lasting “Chucky” franchise, which just ended a critically praised three-season TV run. (Tilly won a Saturn Award in 2022 for her duel role as herself and the iconic talking doll.)
“But the nomination feels like my proudest moment,” Tilly said. “It’s such a weird thing in the industry, where actors and actresses get criticized for promoting themselves. But it’s totally fine when a huge movie company does it? This was one of the times in my life where I really molded the universe to make it adhere to my desires. I didn’t waste any time feeling sad and forgotten. I just did everything I could to make it happen.”
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