According to THR's Scott Feinberg, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences' newfangled online voting system, implemented this year to make it easier for members to hand Anne Hathaway that statuette and such, is doing just the opposite. Voters can't remember their passwords, web security is questionable, and important papers are being mistakenly tossed in the trash like annoying credit card offers. "It’s probably more difficult for members to log on than it is for hackers," said one Oscars voter. Wait a second guys: This could be great. Who needs a Brett Ratner — this could be just what the Oscars need to finally jazz and youthen things up!
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In Friday afternoon's round up of news, AMPAS picked a whole slew of new people to join their ranks of Oscar voters (many who were surprisingly not already members). Also there's highlights of this weekend's new specialty roll outs. Danny Boyle reaches out to PETA about the Olympics, Cee Lo Green boards Keira Knightley production and Lucky heads to the U.S.
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ActionFest, the annual all-action-movie film festival in Asheville, N.C., honored stunt coordinator Jack Gill this weekend with its Man of Action Award. Gill used the platform to discuss his ongoing campaign to add an Oscar category for stunt coordinators, explaining to a panel audience why it’s taken 21 years — and how he’s talking to the voting Academy members of a special committee, one by one — to convince them that stunt professionals are artists just like other film technicians honored on Hollywood's biggest night.
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I had a feeling this was coming: Two years after songwriter Ryan Bingham photo-bombed his own Oscar-nominee luncheon group photo, the customary portrait once again met its match with animators Brandon Oldenburg and William Joyce. Good for them! Someone's gotta have some fun at these things.
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If you feel like whiling away the afternoon following updates about a room full of wealthy entertainers and/or movie-industry craftspeople eating, the Academy's Twitter feed might be for you.
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The New York Times reported Sunday that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' documentary branch is tweaking its qualification rules once again, allowing only theatrical nonfiction feature films that have been reviewed by the NY or LA Times to be considered for Oscar nominations. Furthermore, voting on nominees will be expanded to the entire 166-member Documentary Branch (as opposed to individual committees), and the Academy as a whole can vote for Best Documentary, regardless of how or where members saw the nominated films. The revisions have prompted more than a little hand-wringing around the doc community -- for no especially good reason, alas. Here's why:
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Beginning January 24, 2012, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences will begin cracking down on the lifeblood that arguably keeps awards season flowing each year: Oscar parties. (Gasp!) "To the extent that the public dialog about the Oscars is who threw a good party or ran a successful campaign versus the quality of the work, that's off-point for us," Academy COO Ric Robertson told The Hollywood Reporter. "We want people to be talking about the work."
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The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences announced to its members that online voting is in the works for next year's Oscar race -- and could possibly be implemented as early as this year. But will the digital move make the Oscars susceptible to hackers and disrupt the Academy Awards race as we know it?
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