Actor Matt Damon is unabashedly campaigning for his latest film "The Informant!" to win an Oscar, jesting with reporters Friday in Toronto the script was written using an award algorithm.

"I tallied up all the things that seemed to win awards and we basically made up an algorithm and wrote the movie around that," he quipped at the Toronto film festival, pointing to his formidable physical transformation for the role.

Damon gained almost 30 pounds to play Mark Whitacre, who spied on his employer Archer Daniels Midland for the FBI in the 1990s to gather evidence of price-fixing in the agricultural sector.

In the movie, he sports a dodgy moustache and an outlandish wig.

Charlize Theron underwent a similarly shocking transformation for her Oscar-winning role in "Monster" in 2004, Damon noted.

The Toronto film festival is the biggest in North America and has traditionally been a key event for Oscar-conscious studios and distributors because it is attended by a sizable contingent of North American media.

But it is considered taboo to openly campaign for awards, and so actors and filmmakers almost always shun commenting about their chances.

"In terms of the competition, I'm here to win," Damon joked when pressed by reporters, adding he is still bitter that his performance in "The Brothers Grimm" in 2005 was overlooked by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Director Steven Soderbergh ("Erin Brockovich," "Traffic" and "Ocean's Eleven") also joked that an Oscar nod "is why we did this movie."

The comedic take on whistleblowers, based on Kurt Eichenwald's non-fiction book, also stars Scott Bakula (television's "Enterprise") as an FBI agent, and Melanie Lynskey (television's "Two and a Half Men").

Source: AFP