Films/DVD Asylum

Posted by TA (A) on April 18, 2002 at 19:11:06

In Reply to: What are "screening cassettes"? posted by bubbahotep on April 18, 2002 at 11:30:26:

Voters in the Academy and other film award organizations (New York Critics Circle, etc.) get copies of movies for free from the studios so they can see the movie before they vote. Studios give out DVD screeners these days.

Before DVDs came out, screener VHS cassettes often had widescreen versions of the movie while the public release would be full screen. If you were a film buff, having a connection to widescreen screeners was heaven. I suppose that critics cared more about widescreen than the general public at that time.

Interestingly, there is always controversy over the documentary category in in Oscars. You cannot vote for best documentary in the Academy unless you've seen all the year's nominees, most of which get little distribution. There are grumblings about filmmakers who don't send out screeners and instead host screening parties for the voters, thus limiting the voting group to those who attend the party. (Non-attendees would not have seen all the nominated documentaries and thus cannot vote.) You can guess how much sucking up goes on at these events.