When Oscar season hits Hollywood, count on three things: teary-eyed speechifying, long lines at Botox boutiques, and tightened security on the "screeners" essential to the Academy Awards process. These days, screeners are high-quality DVDs. The movie studios send them to voters as a convenience, since academy members, at least the conscientious ones, have dozens of movies to watch before filling out their ballots.
But there’s one big problem. Academy members and movie production workers may wring their hands over piracy in public, but backstage some of them are apparently file-swapping like tweens. Despite studio attempts to prevent leaks online this year, and the threat of jail time and steep fines for movie pirates, at least four screeners are on file-sharing networks already. More may follow.
During Jack Valenti’s reign as head of the Motion Picture Association of America, panic over awards-season leaks reached such heights that studios banned all screeners in 2003. This miffed academy voters, who had become accustomed to the comforts of viewing at home. The ban was later reversed, but the problem didn’t go away. In recent years, screeners have been issued on DVDs that contain watermarks—hidden data strings—used to trace leaks back to their sources. Other anti-piracy measures include encrypting DVDs so that they will only play in special machines supplied exclusively to voters.
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