Oscar to Viewers: No Skipping the Montages!
YouTube fans hoping to get to the sweet nutmeat of the Oscars without having to digest the massive, fibrous husk that is the rest of the broadcast are out of luck. Variety reports that the Academy has compelled the video-sharing website to pull popular excerpts of actual, entertaining portions of the broadcast, including the opening monologue and Will Ferrell and Beyonce's singing performances.
Well, that's understandable, right? Broadcasters want to protect their revenue. And they want to capture the online audience by posting those clips themselves, so new and repeat viewers can watch and e-mail the clips, thus generating new fans and brand loyalty, no? Um, no. The verboten clips, it turns out, are not available at oscar.com, though you can watch the extended acceptance speeches on the Thank-You Cam (I dare you!) or a five-minute highlight reel selected by the academy. Which will eventually, ahem, disappear.
Way to lure back that under-35 market, Academy! I hereby take back everything I ever said about the Oscars being staid and behind the times.
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Furthermore, most of the general arguments for copyright protection (i.e., that illegal postings detract from the appeal of the original, cut into ratings, damage DVD sales, etc.) don't seem to apply to once-a-year spectacles like the Oscars or Emmys. Sure, Oscar loves montages, but they don't usually montage previous award presentations. Either you saw the Oscars when they aired or, apparently, you are SOL.
It seems particularly foolish for the Academy to go after YouTube clips from the show because those clips are usually, by virtue of their even being posted, the most interesting parts of the ceremony. If ever there was a way to counteract the notion that the Oscars were nothing but interminably boring, it would be by allowing clips of those few gems that do originate from a particular broadcast to proliferate across the Internet. Then those people who don't normally watch the Oscars might see them and reconsider their anti-Oscar position when the show rolls around this year. (Maybe Will Ferrell will sing again this year!)
But that sounds like an entirely too pragmatic position for the Academy to take. Instead, they seem to have adopted the itsminedon'ttouchit! school of copyright management. Pretty ironic considering one of the purposes of the Academy is to archive and preserve access to films for the benefit of the public at large.
- poniewozik Loved the season. Mrs Tuned In wd have put u on the main list RT @boredtodeath Thank u for incl us in Time's Top 10. We'll take hon mention. - 4 hours ago
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- poniewozik Did NPR interview abt multiscreen multitasking. After, automatically reached for iPhone in pocket. Like don draper wd have for cigarettes. - 5 hours ago
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