Oscar News: From The Host to No More Screeners!
© Jason O'Brien
But that's still a ways off, because we have three more months worth of films coming, with so many exciting prospects. This week, we have a variety of Oscar news to wade through, so let's start with this new issue that just happened recently concerning film screening tapes and DVDs, which in the past have been routinely sent to Academy members by the studios to help get their films noticed. In a recent agreement, the major film studios have agreed to side with the Motion Picture Association of America (not the Academy) in their proposal to stop sending out VHS and DVD "screeners" to Academy members and members of other awards organizations in an attempt to stop movie piracy, which continues to become a larger and larger issue. A lot of these screeners that are sent to voting members do end up on auction sites, such as Ebay, and the MPAA figures this would be another way they could help to stop this kind of piracy.
MPAA President Jack Valenti announced this decision before a Senate committee earlier this week, saying that it was "a determined commitment to combat digital piracy and to save movie jobs in the future. There are 400,000-600,000 films being illegally abducted every day ... and the MPAA intends to deploy every weapon at its command to stop this theft."
The major studios had no problem signing on to this proposal, because they have the bigger advertising and more theaters at which to screen their films. This decision however may end up hurting the chances of the smaller, independent films, say like a Lost in Translation, which could now get lost in the bigger Oscar films. The seven member studios of the MPAA also would agree with such a decision, because piracy is a major issue of concern to them as well. In the past, we've seen several "smaller" films get major Oscar attention, and most likely it was because Academy members would receive these smaller films on VHS or DVD to screen in their own homes. One Hollywood publicist said this decision will effectively "take the indies out of the race."
