‘Toy Story’ Screeners Show Academy’s ‘Puritanical’ Rules

If you’re an Academy member, you’d better get used to dull packaging on your screeners

Sometimes, I think there must be nothing duller than an Academy member’s video library.

Toy Story 3 Blu-rayScreener after screener arrives this time of year – and for AMPAS members, each one is packaged in a plain case, with no fancy artwork, no overheated prose, no critics’ quotes, not even a photo from the film on the cover. Title, studio logo, and a “for your consideration” listing on the back or the inside. That’s it – Academy rules don’t allow anything fancier.

And as for the disc itself, heaven forbid that it would contain “making of” featurettes, interviews or directors’ commentary.  Those aren’t permitted, either.

“Toy Story 3,” for example, is now in stores in a deluxe edition with lots of bells and whistles (left). That one can’t legally be sent to voters.

Toy Story 3 guild screenerDisney/Pixar also prepared a simpler guild version (right), which sits in a black cardboard sleeve with a picture of Buzz Lightyear on the cover. But that one is illegal, too: the picture of Buzz makes it too fancy, and the disc inside has special features.

So Academy members get a third “Toy Story” DVD (below), in a plain black cover with the film’s title. There’s a list of achievements to consider, a disc with the movie, and no extras or commentaries.   

I was thinking that it’s too bad for voters that they get such a plain-jane version of the movie … and then I put the Buzz-bedecked version into my DVD player, and found that before the movie started, I had to put up with:

1)    An ad for Disney Blu-Ray discs
2)    A trailer for “Tangled”
3)    A trailer for “The Search for Santa Paws”
4)    An ad for the “Diamond edition Blu-Ray” version of “Bambi”
5)    A teaser trailer for “Cars 2”

Toy Story AMPAS screenerThat’s six-and-a-half minutes of stuff (or a bunch of jabs at the chapter-advance on the DVD remote) that Academy members don’t have to worry about. So maybe there’s something to be said for those bare-bones screeners after all.

By the way, the Academy also has strict rules to govern invitations, screening lists, member participation in Q&As, parties ….

"We do take a rather puritanical view of Academy Awards campaigns," former AMPAS president Richard Kahn, who headed the committee that formulated new campaign restrictions in 2003, once told me.

"For years we liked to pretend that they didn't exist, and when we found out about them we were like Inspector Renault in 'Casablanca' — we were shocked, shocked  to find it was going on. Now we are accused of being rather haughty, stiff-necked and arrogant. But that is the stance we choose to take."

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