After the shocking denouement of the Oscars telecast, in which La La Land was incorrectly announced as “Best Picture,” rumors have been swirling in Hollywood that the Academy Awards results may have been hacked by Russian intelligence. The on-camera snafu Sunday night, it is now believed, may have exposed a long-standing manipulation—even falsification—of Oscars results.
According to unnamed sources in the U.S. intelligence community, La La Land may indeed have garnered the most votes for Best Picture, but elements within the FSB (the Russian security agency that succeeded the former KGB) were intent upon sabotaging a feel-good story that celebrates jazz, a music that was used as propaganda against the Soviet Union in the 1950s and ’60s. “The old KGB guys, they hate jazz and the freedom it stands for,” said one American intelligence analyst. “Well, that, and the Russians thought Ryan Gosling’s dancing and singing were an insult.”
The suspected interference with an essential American cultural institution has exposed long-standing concerns that the Russian Federation—and the Soviet Union before it—has been manipulating Academy Awards results for almost as long as there have been Academy Awards.
It’s long been known that Russia’s leaders care about the Oscars. It is believed that Joseph Stalin personally ordered agents to expose Dalton Trumbo as a Soviet operative, so angry was he that the screenwriter had failed to secure even just a best-picture nomination for 1943’s Mission to Moscow.
The earliest known Soviet interference in the Academy Awards came in 1939. Documents in Soviet archives, briefly available after the fall of communism, revealed that Stalin’s foreign minister was alarmed that a film celebrating the American everyman of the West—John Ford’s Stagecoach—had been voted Hollywood’s top honors. Vyacheslav Molotov consulted closely with Stalin on the question of which of the other films in contention would better discredit the United States, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, with its narrative that American democracy is corrupt, or Gone With the Wind, with its pernicious celebration of slavery. Stalin himself is believed to have made the decision that Gone With the Wind was the most damaging to the United States. Operatives were tasked with altering the vote counts, and at first the Kremlin was concerned that the agents had overdone it. Stalin expressed concern, in internal memos, that eight Academy Awards for Gone With the Wind was so preposterous that Soviet influence in Hollywood might be exposed.
According to a U.S. intelligence source, other years that Russians are believed to have hacked Academy Awards results include 1953, when the actual winner, Shane, was considered by the Kremlin to be less desirable than From Here to Eternity, with its subplots of U.S. military ineptitude and cruelty, and bourgeois corruption.
Personal pique also appears to have come into play. In 1964, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, was at first thought to be a fine piece of agitprop showing American military men as murderously insane nuclear adventurists. KGB agents had already stuffed the Academy Award ballot boxes to guarantee Best Picture honors for the Stanley Kubrick film, when new Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev became aware that the fictitious Russian leader in the movie was portrayed as a womanizing drunk. He is believed to have ordered an immediate switch to My Fair Lady, which Brezhnev considered a damning indictment of the class struggle in the decadent West.
