Variety Magazine is reporting that Lionsgate is flooding voters mailboxes with DVD screeners of Crash, and while this is a normal tactic for every competing film, most studios send out anywhere from 12-15,000 copies.
Lionsgate is sending Crash DVDs to 130,000 voters, including the entire Screen Actors Guild and the Writers Guild. That's an order of magnitude larger.
It's not against the rules, and frankly, I don't see anything wrong with it - once we all get used to the fact that "the movie" isn't the only thing that matters in the Oscar competition, but how you market it also counts, then may the best marketing strategy win. The Weinsteins will certainly echo that sentiment if asked.
What irks me though, is that we'll never know if this worked. Well, let me take that back a bit. If Crash ends up with no nominations, we'll know that the tactic failed. But if it ends up with a slew of nominations, who is to say that the film wouldn't have received those votes anyway? How does a studio marketer measure the effectiveness of any given strategy or tactics? How do they know what to do next year to be effective? Can the poll the Academy voters afterwards? Do they do this already?
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