Hollywood shifts focus to CIA's best side If the Golden Globe awards last month are any guide, one of the big winners at Sunday's Oscars will be, unusually for such events, offstage and all but invisible to the general public. Once depicted by Hollywood as alternatively sinister or buffoonish, the Central Intelligence Agency and its operatives have been portrayed this year by A-list movies venerating them like military and police heroes. The shift in the CIA's popular portrayal is more remarkable for the fact that it coincides with the agency's drone programme, a campaign of offshore assassinations on a scale that used to provoke public and congressional scandals. Ben Affleck, by any measure a Hollywood liberal, paid a warm tribute to the "clandestine services" at the Golden Globes when accepting an award for Argo , about the CIA rescue of hostages held in Iran after the shah's fall in 1979. Best Actress awards on the same night for film and drama series were won by Jessica Chastain, for Zero Dark Thirty , and Claire Danes, for Homeland. Both women play heroic, patriotic and obsessive-to-the-edge-of-psychosis CIA agents. Mr Affleck's movie, and Ms Chastain's performance, are strong contenders at the Oscars. "There has been a major shift in the way the agency has been represented," said Tricia Jenkins of Texas Christian University, the author of a new book on the CIA and Hollywood. The CIA was late to the game with Hollywood, not establishing formal ties until the mid-1990s, its leaders desperate to restore its public standing in the wake of its belated discovery of a damaging Soviet mole, Aldrich Ames. "They started to work with Hollywood in preproduction and that approach has benefited them," said Ms Jenkins. In 1997 the CIA created an entertainment industry liaison section, which, according to its website, aims to give an "accurate portrayal" of the agency and its agents" "skill, innovation, daring, and commitment to public service." Before the filming of Zero Dark Thirty, the Obama administration authorised the Pentagon's top intelligence official to liaise with the director and scriptwriter on the operation that killed Osama bin Laden. Over the course of the cold war, the CIA spied on Americans designated by its political masters as enemies and conspired to commit assassinations on orders from the White House. More recently, even with Nixonian political vendettas consigned to history, the CIA was battered by criticism of its role in enhanced interrogations, or torture, allowed by the Bush administration in its "war on terror." President Barack Obama has stopped the use of torture, while declining to prosecute CIA officers involved in it, but kept the rest of the post-9/11 toolkit. In the case of drones, he has expanded their use to target people the US designates as terrorist threats. The drone attacks have killed several thousand people classified as anti-American combatants in strikes in Pakistan and Yemen since 2008. By most credible independent studies, hundreds of civilians have died alongside them. The CIA's drone programme has begun to attract increased scrutiny on Capitol Hill and in the media over the past year, forcing the Obama administration to reveal some details of their operations. But any backlash against the CIA has so far been minimal compared with the agency's previous scandals. Hollywood has helped, though Zero Dark Thirty's suggestion that torture helped capture bin Laden created a backlash of its own and may have damaged the movie's chances of winning Best Picture on Sunday. Partisan politics, and the contrast between the foreign policies of Mr Obama and his predecessor, may also have protected the CIA from criticism on drones. "The image of the CIA is purely a function of the image of us as a country and how we conduct ourselves abroad," said Tim Weiner, the author of Legacy of Ashes, a history of the agency. Mr Weiner says the CIA's standing "rises and falls" along with public perceptions of US foreign policy, which plummeted during Mr Bush's conduct of the wars in Afghanistan and particularly Iraq. But in addition Mr Obama might get a pass where Mr Bush did not. According to a poll by Michael Tesler, of Brown University, and published in Salon, the news and entertainment website, support for the drone attacks jumped substantially among liberal whites and African-Americans when they told they were ordered by Mr Obama. Although his film is set in the 1970s, Mr Affleck's praise is not limited to former CIA operatives. "These are extraordinary, honourable people at the CIA," he told Bill O'Reilly at Fox News before the film's release, appearing to startle the popular conservative host with his pronouncement. Make no mistake about it. Before filming, Mr Affleck was admitted to the CIA headquarters outside Washington to meet David Petraeus, the general who then headed the CIA. Mr Petraeus has since resigned after admitting to having an affair. Anti-heroes How the agency has been portrayed on the big screen Zero Dark Thirty (2012) A chronicle of the hunt for al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and his death at the hands of US Navy Seals in May 2011 (starring Jessica Chastain). Republicans suggested the film-makers were given improper access to classified materials, which they and the US government deny. Argo (2012) Dramatisation of the 1980 CIA-Canadian operation to extract six US diplomatic personnel from revolutionary Iran. The six fled the US embassy in Tehran for the sanctuary of the Canadian envoy's house, from where they were rescued by CIA operative Tony Mendez (played by Ben Affleck). Syriana (2005) A politically charged epic about the oil industry told through the lives of people personally involved and affected by it, including a CIA operative (played by George Clooney), an energy analyst, a lawyer and a young unemployed Pakistani migrant worker. The Good Shepherd (2006) A film about the tumultuous early history of the CIA as viewed through the prism of one man's life (played by Matt Damon). The Robert De Niro-directed movie takes in the aftermath of the second world war in Europe through to the US Bay of Pigs operation in Cuba.