What is Oscar Season without parties? We may soon find out

It’s hard to think about the Oscars without thinking about parties—from the boozy Golden Globes that lead up to them to the, ahem, Vanity Fair Oscar party, the Academy Awards have for years offered both a chance to honor the best achievements in film and to celebrate those achievers with a toast (or five). But for the people inside the gauntlet known collectively as “awards season,” it’s not just one big party at the end; it’s an endless stream of cocktail receptions and luncheons and meet and greets and full-blown parties, lasting often from September until the end of February. And, if new Academy rules come into play, it may be ending.

In addition to inviting a vast and unusually diverse list of new members to join their ranks, the Academy has also unveiled new rules about how its members can be wooed by the publicists and studios in search of Oscar glory. The new rule forbids Academy members from being invited to or attending “any non-screening event, party or dinner that is reasonably perceived to unduly influence members or undermine the integrity of the vote.”

What does “unduly influence” mean? What does a “non-screening party, event, or dinner” even mean? The definition, as Scott Feinberg points out in The Hollywood Reporter, may turn out to be fuzzy. The swanky luncheons and parties thrown by power brokers like Peggy Siegal in New York and Los Angeles are often already preceded by screenings; sure, many members may show up for the free cocktails and skip the screening, but as one source tells Feinberg, “Is the Academy going to take attendance at these?"

As Feinberg also points out, the larger size of the Academy—the 683 new invitees would make a nearly 10 percent increase in the membership from last year—may also make it more expensive to campaign to begin with, which could also put a limit on parties. If you’re Harvey Weinstein, you’re willing to spend almost endlessly to promote what could be your next Shakespeare in Love or The Artist. But even the biggest moguls have pockets that only run so deep.

It’s hard to imagine awards season continuing without the party circuit that surrounds it. Even if luncheons or parties “in honor of” a specific film or actor are outright banned, there will still be events like the New York Film Critics Circle Awards, the Santa Barbara Film Festival, and the Golden Globes that bring together Academy voters, awards hopefuls, and press in rooms where the drinks are flowing to make the affection even more palpable. How much the Academy’s new rules are able to impact these events depends, it seems, on how much the Academy wants to enforce them. But if there are studios who wanted to cut down on their schmoozing budget this season, they’ve now been handed the perfect excuse.

(VANITY FAIR)