Oscar bait nominated for Oscars. For that reason studios plan their Oscar promotional campaigns long before the movie is even released. It has been estimated that The Weinstein Company spent $15 million on its Oscar campaign for "The King's Speech", almost as much as was spent on the Oscar campaign of Weinstein-produced 1998 Best Picture Winner "Shakespeare in Love". Actors, too, benefit at least financially from Oscar wins. Agents and managers estimate that their clients can get as much as 20% more money for their next projects if they win an Oscar or at least received a nomination. Natalie Portman was expected
Mrs. Ted Bliss to the character of Mrs. Bliss. Walter Goodman, a television critic for "The New York Times", mentions in his review that "[the book] may not be Stanley Elkin's best, but it is a smart, generous, melancholy, funny, even elegiac work by a prodigious practitioner". "Publishers Weekly" writes that "Elkin is at his best here, blessed with the gift of one-liner insight and a definite, if reluctantly exercised, ability to tug on a reader's heartstrings". Elkin won the 1995 National Book Critics Circle Award in the fiction category for the novel. The book was nominated along with "Independence Day" (by Richard