Oscars Viewing Mandate Already Has Loopholes

A few weeks back came the news that the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) had outlined new rules for the Academy Awards.

Under those rules, members are required to watch every film in a category in order to vote on it. To do so they had to either play the film through member-exclusive streaming service ‘Academy Screening Room’, or to see the film at a cinema or festival and fill out forms verifying when and where they viewed it.

The trades are already nicknaming this ‘The Brutalist Rule’ in response to voters admitting they never finished or even started Brady Corbet’s 215-minute epic, others simply second-screened it.

The goal here is to create a system where smaller films don’t get lost amid larger and more well-funded campaigns. While the reception from members has been overwhelmingly positive, some have spoken with Variety and revealed members have already been exploiting loopholes with the Screening Room streamer.

One person tells the trade: “The app only needs to see that you watched it. It doesn’t know if you’re sitting there.” Another admits to hitting play before leaving the house to go to work. A similar measure was already enacted in the international feature voting category, and has its own loopholes that include “speed-watching films at 1.5x to pressing play before heading to the gym”.

There’s also reportedly no penalty for pledging on the online form that you watched a title, even if you didn’t, as it operates on the honor system. Whether the changes will have any real impact on the vote we’ll likely not know until a few years of it being in place have played out.

Source: Variety

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