Brent Bozell | Jan 30, 201

The Academy Awards is meant to be the world's most prestigious honors for achievement in movies. Politics should have nothing to do with it, but, increasingly, that's not so. Hollywood is now regularly treading beyond "artistic excellence" and letting political overtones sway the outcome. [emphasis mine]

For months now the "diversity" crowd has wailed and gnashed its teeth over the lack of Oscar interest in "Selma," as if Hollywood harbors a racist underbelly. They will not accept that maybe the movie wasn't that good. Even worse, they won't accept that the studio executives at Paramount stupidly screwed up by not sending DVD screeners to all the Oscar voters.

But older culture watchers remember 1985, when "The Color Purple" with a largely black cast went from a potential Oscar sweep of 11 nominations to an Oscar shutout -- zero statues. Why? Activists like the Coalition Against Black Exploitation charged that the film "exacerbates the current schism between black males and females, degrades both sexes and portrays the black family in an exceedingly negative light to the world at large." Art took a backseat to politics.

The Oscar season is beginning to look as political as a presidential campaign, and the most legendary campaigner is Harvey Weinstein. In Hollywood, it's remembered how Weinstein manipulated his movie "The King's Speech" ahead of the Facebook-founding story of "The Social Network" for the Best Picture honor in 2010.

He is a terrific marketer by any measure. CBS anchor Charlie Rose recently told Weinstein if you took a poll of 100 people in Hollywood, all 100 would pick him as the most effective Oscar campaigner. Weinstein replied, "I learned a long time ago because of that -- because of my success, I spend less money than anybody and I work twice as hard, OK? Maybe five times as hard."

He also knows how to leverage liberal guilt.

This year Weinstein is aggressively urging Oscar voters to strike a blow for "justice" for homosexuals by voting for his film "The Imitation Game." The film focuses on Alan Turing, the English math genius who cracked the Nazi code in World War II, but was later arrested and subjected to chemical castration for his homosexuality.

On Jan. 24, the Weinstein Company placed newspaper ads quoting Chad Griffin, president of the gay left advocacy group the Human Rights Campaign, bestowing its blessing on ''The Imitation Game.' They're also using testimonials from Internet moguls at Netflix, Google and YouTube, not to mention former government officials like recent Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

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