MPAA head Jack Valenti has asked that the major studios not submit screeners for the Oscars because they inevitably get into the hands of pirates. Indeed, almost every Oscar-considered movie ends up on KaZaA long before they will debut on DVD (and often enough, while the movie is still in theaters), often with “screener copy” as part of the filename.

(For the curious: No, I do not download feature movies from the web. Oh, I’ll download a song if I have absolutely no intention of buying the album, or a video of a TV show, etc. For the most part, I ascribe to the Digital Archive Project’s standards of trading an item, unless it’s available for purchase, as “fair use”.)

I applaud the movie industry’s attempts to stamp out piracy and theft, but they’re going to have to come up with SOME way to help Academy voters see the movies they haven’t seen or it will hurt the smaller studios.

One odd thing I noted in that Fox 411 column is listing “Winged Migration” as a film released this year which could be hurt in the Oscars. That’s odd, considering it already was one of the films up for best documentary last year (under its original foreign title). Certainly Winged Migration deserves it, as it is a true documentary involving seven years of filming the reality of birds as they traveled the globe…but it already lost to a guy who makes opinion pieces and calls them documentaries. (By those standards, all comedy and music performance films are documentaries just because they use footage of actual events.)

Now, here’s a question: does a film get to qualify twice if it is released as an American adaptation? After all, “Spirited Away” won best Animated Film last year even though it debuted in Japan the previous year. Why didn’t it compete in the foreign films category the previous year? Indeed, why are foreign documentaries like Winged Migration not competing as both foreign films and documentaries?

I have to go lie down.