The Motion Picture Association of America has announced that, in an effort to combat digital piracy, it will prohibit its members from sending out award screeners this year. The Los Angeles Film Critics Association, in response, has announced that it will be unable to conduct its annual awards and has, thus, cancelled the event.

The “screeners” in question are video and DVD copies of award-eligible films which are sent out to members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Science (those who vote on the Oscars) and jurors in some of the most prominent film-critics societies, including the Chicago Film Critics Association, the Online Film Critics Society, the National Board of Review and the aforementioned Los Angeles Film Critics Association.

The rationale behind the distribution of these videos and DVDs — which are frequently of movies still in theaters or, making matters even more complicated, yet-to-be-released — is that they provide voters the opportunity to see all the films in contention before casting their vote.

Not only does this allow for recipients to not worry about missing a film or two during the course of the year, but it also assures that those movies that are award-eligible but that only play in New York or Los Angeles are viewable by jurors.

The ban on these screeners, however, only applies to MPAA members (Disney, Warner Bros., MGM, Paramount, 20th Century Fox, Universal and Sony) as well as Dreamworks and New Line, which have agreed to cooperate. This makes matters somewhat more complicated, being that the only companies not affected are the independents that need screeners the most as a means of simply publicizing the existence of their films.

But in Hollywood, not even the word “independent” is without surprise. As corporate America would have it, some of the most respected “independent” studios are really just arms of MPAA members and, thus, covered by the ban. For example, Miramax is part of Disney, Sony Pictures Classics is part of the Columbia-dominated Sony and Fox Searchlight is a subsidiary of 20th Century Fox.

Resultantly, the only companies left sending screeners are the true independents, which are often so small they cannot even afford such a mass-mailing of DVDs.

The question truly begged by the MPAA move, then, is will it be more costly to tamper with end-of-the-year awards or to allow for the risk of screener bootlegging? This is a particularly difficult question, because it is almost impossible to determine what extent of online and street piracy is a result of screener duplication and what amount of box-office revenue is a result of award prestige.

The studios certainly hold some level of confidence in the awards as a marketing tool, as almost every major film advertises in newspapers, magazines, on TV, on the back of its eventual video box and in all future promotions the awards for which it has been nominated or that it was received.

Piracy, on the other hand, is quickly becoming as much of a threat to the film industry as mp3 sharing is to the music industry. The MPAA estimates that cinema loses in excess of $3 billion a year due to piracy.

But the screener ban is not being pushed as an answer to all piracy. In fact, the extent of piracy resultant from screener duplication is a mystery. And there is a bitter irony to those who engage in such criminal acts. After all, screeners are only sent to members of Hollywood’s elite guilds, societies and associations — in other words, people who make their living in the film industry. So, those who engage in screener duplication are essentially damaging themselves.

Yet it is doubtful that the Oscars will go the way of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association awards. The March kudos will still likely be held, but audiences may expect to see honors bestowed upon the more prominently released films, as those will be the ones most accessible to Academy members. In other words, there will be more “Titanics” and fewer “Full Monties.”

Mac VerStandig ([email protected]) is a former member of the Online Film Critics Society and a sophomore majoring in rhetoric.