We’re down covering the awards in a new way this year, on the ground, and we’ll try to give you an overview of the things that are surprising or intriguing us. Here are the “5 Things I Learned About the Oscars Yesterday”
- Reporters from several outlets had their credentials revoked after they took high resolution digital photos of their own press badges and posted them on their site. Morons.
- The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS, read: Oscar) staff is professional and polite but they’re not kidding around. The area around the Kodak Theater is run in a way only slightly dissimilar from what one would imagine is the operational structure of the Green Zone. It’s rather unpleasant but entirely necessary. If you want to feel like you’re nine-years old again and about to break a schoolyard rule, mess with an AMPAS person working the Oscars
- It will likely rain buckets on Sunday. They already have tents up in anticipation
- The baffling preferential voting system, which for the first time is being employed for Best Picture this year (nicely encapsulated here) will likely dramatically change the campaigning approach, if they keep it next year. In this system, a picture that does NOT have the most #1 votes could conceivably win Best Picture. Okay, we already knew this before yesterday but we heard it a lot yesterday.
- Sources say Nicholas Chartier, the Hurt Locker producer who was banned from attending the ceremony, has a long history as a disruptive presence and is not well-liked (here’s just a taste from a recent L.A Times article). Still, the wags say, the banning seems heavy-handed by the Academy and to not have a precedent.
by Keith Simanton