And the award for the best backstabber goes to...

You've heard, by now, the scandal about

Each of these rumours, for such they are, is untrue and symptomatic of a certain annual phenomenon. Each January, as the Oscar nominations are announced, a small but persistent campaign swings into force, as Hollywood publicists, agents and producers do whatever it takes to discredit the opposition and push their own clients to victory. Freelance publicists are hired by studios unwilling to dirty their own hands. 'People always call it a whispering campaign; it's not. These things are said out loud. They're meant to be heard above the noise,' says Steven Gaydos, executive editor of Variety.

Many in the industry claim gossip is inevitable, given the essential lack of transparency to the process. The Oscars began in 1929 as an industry brunch at LA's Roosevelt Hotel; today, they're voted for by the approximately 6,000 current members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, an industry body comprised of nominees' peers: directors, producers, screenwriters, actors and technicians. Their votes are never made public. The Academy's membership is skewed towards older and more conservative Hollywood royalty, though recent years have seen moves to introduce younger members: Dakota Fanning received an invitation aged 12. And while the Academy has never revealed its entire roster, it has begun announcing new members such as Anne Hathaway in 2009 and Carey Mulligan, who will be voting for the first time this year.

Over here, the BAFTAs are a model of British civility, with film-makers quietly hopeful of success and producers gently nudging their projects into the public eye. Compared with the volume and intensity of the Oscars race, the process has a cosy, county cricket air. 'There's nothing in the way of dirty tricks here,' confirms veteran London publicist Charles McDonald. 'That kind of intensive, all-consuming campaigning just doesn't go on; people are generally much more laid-back about it all, or at least try to appear that way. But one thing I will say, having worked on [Sam Taylor-Wood's] Nowhere Boy last year, is that a British film that doesn't have a US distributor and a US Oscar campaign behind it doesn't have nearly the same shot at a BAFTA as one that does. More than ever, the BAFTAs are a stepping stone to the Academy Awards.'

The Golden Globes, meanwhile, are decided by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), a shadowy organisation comprised of just 90 men and women, whose smallness and secrecy renders it susceptible to charges of undue influence. As in 1982, when an unknown Pia Zadora won the Golden Globe for 'New Star of the Year in a Motion Picture - Actress' for Butterfly, a tiny film produced by her then-husband, the multimillionaire Meshulam Riklis (the man credited with inventing junk bonds), who invited a dozen members of the HFPA to a night at his Riviera hotel in Las Vegas to enjoy his wife's stage performance. A few weeks later, he treated another group of HFPA voters to lunch and a private screening of the film at his Beverly Hills mansion. The outcome, many observers believed, was never in doubt.

As the industry's yardstick, the Oscars organisers are eager to be seen as incorruptible. Since 2003, for example, when the Academy became concerned that votes were being bought with expensive dinners and receptions ('parties that, in fact, are heavy-handed lobbying occasions,' it admitted in a statement, 'have become one of the most distasteful aspects of the awards process'), producers have been barred from entertaining in the name of their film, though many have been ingenious in finding ways around this rule, such as the black-tie gala in LA for Dreamgirls at which Beyoncé performed live. And the fierceness of the campaigns has also diminished, outwardly, at least. These days, the US is a lobbyist culture, sustained by an endless TV and online news cycle. And a well-placed rumour is the weapon of choice.

In 2009, the seemingly unstoppable rise of Slumdog Millionaire was threatened when a number of reports appeared, more or less simultaneously, in the press, detailing the mistreatment of Indian children employed as extras on the Mumbai production. The children, it was claimed, were subjected to punishing on-set schedules, and then cheated out of their wages. The local cast were paid less than their Western counterparts - director Danny Boyle admitted as much to The Times, months later. Nevertheless, an article in the Los Angeles Times noted the 'suspicious' timing of the negative reports, which emerged 'on the very day Oscar ballots were being mailed'.

Timing is a funny thing. In 2003, just days after Roman Polanski was nominated as Best Director for The Pianist, Samantha Geimer, the teenage girl he allegedly raped in Los Angeles 26 years earlier, appeared on CNN's Larry King Live to discuss her experience. Geimer urged that Polanski be forgiven and allowed to return to the US. If her appearance was, in fact, carefully stage-managed by Focus Features, the film's US distributors, as many in Hollywood suggested at the time, then it did the trick: weeks later, Polanski won his first Oscar, albeit in absentia.

And why not? A spot on a chat show has definite advantages, not least, that it's considerably cheaper than buying ad time. Campaigns cost money: even in these post-recessionary times, many of this year's Best Picture nominees will spend upwards of $10 million on publicity between December and Oscar night, according to a report in the marketing trade magazine Ad Age. (Miramax and Paramount Vantage reportedly spent $15 million to secure No Country For Old Men its Best Picture award in 2008.) A decade ago, that figure was often closer to $20 million - the amount spent on Gladiator, for instance.

This year, rather than rely on his studio's publicists, Justin Timberlake has reportedly funded his own private campaign for Best Supporting Actor in The Social Network, after his agent felt that Sony was prioritising Jesse Eisenberg's Best Actor chances over his own. Expect to see a lot of Timberlake on chat shows and entertainment news programmes in the next few weeks.

So is all the hard work worth it? Certainly being nominated can be lucrative, with some of the Best Picture entries earning most of their revenue after they've been included on the ten-film long list: Slumdog Millionaire, for example, took $45.8 million before it was nominated, and $97.4 million after. But Slumdog was very much an 'awards movie', released in the US in mid-November, at the height of Oscar season. Yet a 2009 study in Ad Age showed that even taking home the biggest prize of the night is only likely to boost US box office by an average of $13 million. For a low-budget film such as The Hurt Locker (or, this year, The King's Speech) such a figure represents a decent addition to their profits, but for $200 million-plus blockbusters like Avatar, you wonder why they even bother. 'Winning an Oscar is mostly a strategic thing,' says a US publicist. 'Because it increases your value in Hollywood. For directors, it makes it easier to make the films they really want to. And for actors and writers, it means a bigger pay cheque next time around.'

For a relative newcomer like Carey Mulligan, it can mean an entrée into big-budget Hollywood productions. No sooner had Oscar buzz started to circulate around her performance in An Education, for which she was nominated as Best Actress, eventually losing out to Sandra Bullock for The Blind Side, than she scored a co-starring role as Michael Douglas's daughter in Oliver Stone's Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.