On Dec. 5 the Academy’s Board of Governors approved a new plan that effects how future Oscar campaigns will move forward. The details were revealed this morning in a meeting with publicists and consultants and, needless to say, it didn’t all go smoothly.
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According to the new rules, after March 4 studios, filmmakers or distributors will no longer be able to physically mail screeners, screening notices, event invitations, screenplays, soundtrack CDs or any other promotional material directly to Academy members. From now on the Academy will be the point person in sending these items to the membership through a third party warehouse and/or distribution system. Granted, the Academy is not the first organization to do this. SAG, the Television Academy and the DGA also use this mechanism to control their membership lists and to insure their members are not “harassed” by studios or consultants wanting to update their lists with the most up-to date information. Oscar consultants have been making additional income “selling” access to these lists to studios and up until now the Academy looked the other way. That’s no longer the case. Obviously, the Academy will include a fee to cover shipping (and perhaps help with the increasing costs of the Academy Museum under construction), but, surprise, they didn’t think everything out completely.
Somehow, the Academy missed out on a potential new policy on E-mailing members. Yes, AMPAS took into account membership-wide blasts say for a digital screener, but not for invitations to hosted screening targeted to specific members (say in a specific city) or outreach to voters for individual branches such as Foreign Language or Documentary. Those on hand were concerned about how they strategically target specific voters/branches for these types of events. Do all members want to get their inbox flooded with invites to events in other branches they have no interest in? Probably, not.
Also, as noted, AMPAS is not handling this internally. They are currently vetting three mailing houses who will take care of sending screeners as well as email correspondence (yikes). So, the burden will be on the mailing houses to handle all these requests (and anyone with experience in outsourcing knows how fun this always is, right?). The organization seemed to admit they had not taken all of this into consideration and will circle back internally and return with concrete details in the weeks ahead.
Additionally, the Academy is planning on sending out a questionnaire to the membership asking them if they want items such as screenplays, CD’s, etc. Studios and consultants will be allowed to provide input on what is asked.
So, change is coming for the 2019 Oscar season, but how it is implemented remains to be seen.