Scott Rudin wanted Nicole Kidman to wear the prosthetic. Harvey Weinstein did not. The disagreement wound up defining one of modern Hollywood’s more surreal Oscar campaigns. It ended onstage at the Kodak Theatre on March 23, 2003, when Denzel Washington opened the envelope and announced the best actress winner with three cheeky words: “By a nose.”

The Hours, based on the Pulitzer Prize–winning best seller by Michael Cunningham and distributed by Paramount Pictures, reimagines Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway as a transformative text rippling through the lives of three generations of women. In the film’s earliest timeline, a deglammed Kidman portrays the acid-tongued Woolf herself, as she scratches prose into a notebook and struggles to decide if she wants to live or die. In the 1950s thread, Julianne Moore plays a pregnant, repressed housewife whose only relief is escaping into the pages of Mrs. Dalloway. Finally, in the modern day, Meryl Streep is a book editor named Clarissa, after Woolf’s heroine: She’s preparing for a party, just as Mrs. Dalloway was, and clearly embodies her in elemental ways. All three actors were decorated, award-winning stars. When The Hours was released in December 2002, they shook up the Oscar race, competing with each other and—in an unusual twist—even other roles of their own. 

As the film was a coproduction of Weinstein’s Miramax Films and Scott Rudin Productions, the cast had the support of two men who could reasonably be called competitive. That, not so shockingly, turned out to be a mixed blessing. Premiering three years after Weinstein’s infamous best picture upset for Shakespeare in Love—which was credited with turning Oscar campaigning into a relentless global battle—The Hours sparked extensive media coverage. Cunningham, who attended screenings, receptions, and awards ceremonies to support the adaptation, says now that he was “astonished by the pace” of the press tour; the film’s director, Stephen Daldry, said the same 20 years ago. 

The 2002–2003 awards season marked the Weinstein era’s apex, with three Miramax films nominated for the best picture Oscar in The Hours, Gangs of New York, and the eventual winner, Chicago. But Rudin drove the campaign for The Hours, his first-ever best picture nominee. “I just remember endless double-truck ads in the LA and New York Times, which is very Scott,” says Terry Press, who ran marketing for DreamWorks Pictures at the time. “The art with the three women—I can still see the ads in my head.” It’s a lasting irony that such a poetic movie about the inner lives of women was marketed and distributed by two infamously aggressive men. Asked to comment on the awards machine at the time, Moore said, “These things have such economic value to the studios that this is what starts happening. You don’t want it to become about that, but there’s nothing you can do.”

The Oscar nominations for the cast played out in such a complicated way that recalling them is almost headache-inducing. Kidman and Streep were positioned for Hours in the best actress category, but the latter was passed over because voters preferred her supporting role in Spike Jonze’s Adaptation. Asked at the time if she was excited about The Hours and Adaptation hitting theaters simultaneously, Streep replied, “No question, two really interesting things. I only wish they’d come out a year apart.” (Easing the pain of overexposure was the fact that the nomination for Adaptation made Streep the most Oscar-nominated actor ever, surpassing Katharine Hepburn.) As for Moore, she requested that Paramount campaign her in supporting for The Hours because of her acclaimed turn as another ’50s housewife, in Todd Haynes’s homage to Douglas Sirk, Far From Heaven. She ended up being nominated for both movies, competing in both the best actress and supporting categories. 

Kidman, who had the clearest path to Oscar victory, was everywhere for months, as was talk about the prosthetic occupying prime real estate on her face. Two months before Washington opened the envelope, a column in Daily Variety read, “If Nicole Kidman wins this horse race, it may just be by a nose.” Who knows if Washington saw the article. By the night of the Oscars, the prosthetic drama had swirled enough that he and everyone else in the Kodak Theatre may as well have.

Throughout The Hours’ production, Cunningham stayed in touch with screenwriter David Hare. They spoke at length about the toughest scenes to adapt and how the project was shaping up. Cunningham also visited the set occasionally. “Pretty much everyone was nervous about the nose—the idea of sabotaging Nicole’s beauty,” he says. As Kidman herself put it back in 2002: “I was fearful that the minute I walked on people would start to laugh.”

A guide to Hollywood’s biggest races

That didn’t happen, with critics mostly praising the prosthetic work. Hare says now that he didn’t mind the controversy surrounding it, especially given Kidman’s ultimate victory: “Underneath that nose, she’s giving one of the great acting performances, so who cares?”

Some people did, unfortunately. The New York Times assembled Woolf scholars for a story headlined “The Nose Was the Final Straw,” in which one professor huffed that the literary icon was “turned into this absolutely maimed fool with a really ugly nose.” (“I don’t give a flying fuck about the academics,” Hare says now, adding that a few later apologized. “[That] was incredibly mean-spirited.”) Costume designer Ann Roth, who first suggested the prosthetic, was reportedly “disturbed” by the attention surrounding it. Rudin said, “I ultimately hate the discussion of the nose.” And, even before the movie came out, Kidman told Newsweek she’d already been asked about the nose “hundreds” of times by the press. Prompted to comment on it again, she said, only half-joking, “Harvey told me I’m not to say anything.” 

Weinstein and Rudin had feuded across several previous projects, so some headbutting was to be expected on The Hours. Rudin developed the script with Hare for about a year, though, and had final cut. He toyed with the mercurial Weinstein by showing off the film’s bold creative decisions—prosthetic included. “Scott won most of the fights,” Cunningham says. However, according to New York magazine at the time, Weinstein nixed a premiere for The Hours at the Venice International Film Festival, which Rudin interpreted as retaliation. He sent Weinstein—a notorious chain-smoker—a crate of cigarettes, which quickly became legend. The enclosed note read “Thanks as always for your help.”

Weinstein was coming off of getting “caught” waging a smear campaign against the real-life subject of the previous year’s best picture winner, A Beautiful Mind, says Press: “That’s the year that Harvey started to pay a price in the press—he got caught really being abusive and spreading that stuff about John Nash. The next year you would’ve seen a subtle shift because the press was focusing more on the dirty tricks.”

Even so, the fact that Weinstein and Rudin were firmly established as bullies made for good copy—which they didn’t seem to mind. “One of the reasons filmmakers seek to work with Harvey and me is they want that combative ability,” Rudin told the Los Angeles Times weeks before the Oscars. “They don’t want you to be nice and sweet. They want you to go and kill for them. And that is the job. You are supposed to go out there and mow down the opposition.” 

The true extent of the two men’s alleged misconduct hadn’t yet been reported, of course. Weinstein has since faced dozens of allegations of sexual misconduct, and he’s currently serving a 23-year prison sentence after being found guilty of a criminal sexual act and rape in New York. Allegations of abusive behavior against Rudin, first printed by The Hollywood Reporter in 2021, detailed instances of physical violence and bullying against employees. His career has since stalled.

Back in their glory days, however, they served as their own hype machines. “You had them spending millions and millions of dollars,” Press says. Sometimes, as with Kidman, it worked; other times, not so much. “Absolutely everybody told me I was going to win,” Hare says of the best adapted screenplay category, which he lost to The Pianist’s Ronald Harwood. He spent months on the trail with victory in mind. “When I didn’t win, I was pretty pissed off for about two and a half hours.” The next day, he says, “I didn’t care anymore.” 

Outside of Kidman’s win, The Hours slightly underperformed at the Oscars, at which Catherine Zeta-Jones won best supporting actress; both Streep and Moore went home empty-handed. A few months before, however, it won best drama picture and actress (Kidman) at the Golden Globes, which wound up being the peak of its awards run. All three Hours actors were nominated and in attendance; Streep even won the supporting actress award for Adaptation, her first win since 1982’s Sophie’s Choice, which prompted the star to begin her speech by saying, “I’ve just been nominated 789 times, and I was getting so settled over there for a long winter’s nap!”

Cunningham attended the Globes as well. He remembers the “great party,” sitting in the same room as Kidman, Streep, Moore, and Rudin, as a validation of The Hours’ most hotly debated (facial) feature. “In some parallel dimension, the movie went down over Nicole Kidman’s plastic nose,” he says. “It didn’t happen in this dimension.” 

CORRECTION: This article has been updated to accurately reflect that Meryl Streep is the most Oscar-nominated actor.