The 79th Academy Awards: the Nominees and the Pirates
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
The nominations for this season's Academy Awards are out. No major shocks; it's a little odd that Dreamgirls got 8 nominations, but isn't up for Best Picture. Children of Men picked up two nominations -- Achievement in cinematography and Achievement in film editing -- possibly on the back of the grassroots campaign to get Children of Men noticed by Oscars voters. Pan's Labyrinth did well with six nominations: Achievement in art direction, Achievement in cinematography, Achievement in makeup, Achievement in music written for motion pictures (Original score), Original screenplay and Best foreign language film of the year. It deserves to win more a lot of those, but I imagine it'll probably only pick up Best foreign language film. I truly hope that Happy Feet wins over Cars and Monster House in the Best animated feature category - I was really quite surprised that Cars won the Golden Globe over Happy Feet!
However, the most interesting Oscars story is that Andy "Waxy" Baio has revived his tradition of looking at how widely Oscar-nominated films are being pirated. He's produced a detailed analysis (provocatively titled "Pirating the 2007 Oscars"), which included these findings:
* Academy members received screeners for 30 out of 34. (Everything except Click, Monster House, Poseidon, and Black Dahlia.)Andy also touches on one of the more the controversial issue of the film distributors: is it better to limit/encrypt/tightly control Oscar screeners (the free copies of films sent to Oscar voters to garner their support) or is it better to distribute the film widely - and thus more potentially accessible to pirates - with a view broadening the ease of watching and thus appeal to voters (as Andy notes, it seemed to work for Crash).
* 31 out of 34 films were released online in some form, including camcorder footage. (Everything except Letters from Iwo Jima, Notes on a Scandal, and Venus.)
* 24 screeners were leaked online. (In several cases, they were leaked months before Academy screeners were mailed.)
* The average length of time between a film's USA release and its first appearance online is 12 days.
* 9 screeners appeared online before they were mailed to Academy members.
* On average, a screener appears online 24 days before it's received by Academy members. (Excluding these early leaks, the average time is 13 days.)
All in all, this analysis is a solid picture of how the torrent and pirate scene is operating as well as insight into the futility of many RIAA/MPAA efforts.
[Tags: oscars | academyawards | 2007 | 79th | piracy | bittorrent | childrenofmen]
[Posted by Unknown] [11:42 am]
1 Comments:
Great information
Thanks
Post a Comment
<< Home