It's mid-February, which means one thing in Hollywood: Almost everybody who has anything to do with the Academy Awards race just wants it to be over.
With the race for key awards seemingly over, people are getting tired of the marathon that Oscar season has become.
At the Directors Guild awards, I asked presenter Jean Dujardin – who has been in Los Angeles for much of the fall and winter, attending parties and doing interviews and making television appearances in a language that is not his own – how he was holding up through it all.
"I’m fine," “The Artist” star said with an easy smile, a few days after landing his Oscar nomination.
"Good," I said, "because you only have a month to go."
"One month still?" he said, with a crestfallen look that belied the fact that he certainly must have known that the Oscars weren't happening until February 26.
A few minutes later, I encountered Best Supporting Actor nominee Nick Nolte (below, with Gary Oldman), who was attending the DGA Awards not because he was participating, but because he'd been told he should.
"The PR people tell you you've gotta get out there like it's a presidential campaign or something," he said with a shrug. "The difference is that we don't get to run the country if we win. We only get a little statue."
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And at the end of the night, I ran into last year's DGA and Oscar winner, "The King's Speech" director Tom Hooper. "Looking at it from the outside this year," he said with a grin, "I now realize that people just write stuff pretending that there's a race going on for the last few weeks.
"They have to keep up the interest somehow."
So the smiling, the campaigning, the pretending keeps on keeping on, because that's awards season. And this year, it has been more exhausting than usual, because of new Academy campaign rules that lifted most of the restrictions on parties and Q&As before the nominations were announced.
"From what I read, that turned out to be a good free-for-all," Academy president Tom Sherak told TheWrap recently.
But the Academy also set what Sherak called "some really strict rules" for the post-nomination period: no parties, no receptions, and only two post-screening Q&As for each person associated with a nominated film.
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The restrictions have stopped the parties -- at least the big ones, which Sherak said were the target of the new rules.
"If somebody wants to have a party at their house and invite 12 people, I'm not a policeman and I'm not going to tell you that you can't do that," he said.
