My previous entry has gotten a huge number of hits, thanks to links from Kottke.org and Waxy.org. Along with that torrent of readership has come a number of interesting and thoughtful comments. I’m going to respond to a few of them over the next couple of days. Needless to say, my responses reflect my own views, and not those of any organization to which I might belong…
I’ll start off with the most important question from a reader named “Chess”:
Why do _you_ care about screeners? How do they affect your life in a practical way?

Let’s get one thing straight. I don’t care about screeners in the way that I care about, say, political injustice, or human suffering. As it happens, though, there are numerous people more qualified than I am to ameliorate human suffering or expose political injustice. So I’m sticking to matters to the conversation about which I have something to add. (Incidentally, I also care about not ending a sentence with a preposition.)
So why do I care about screeners at all? Because I care about movies and the movie industry, and–God help me–I even care about awards shows. For all the schmaltz of the winners and the questionable decisions of the voters, Oscar and all his cousins serve to get people talking about the best works in a medium I love–even when that talk consists of phrases like “I can’t believe they gave an Oscar to that piece of crap.”
More broadly, I have a professional stake in the future of the entertainment industry, but I don’t have any real control over its future. The people who do should have been paying close attention in that brief period when bandwidth was plentiful enough to pirate music, but not quite enough to pirate movies. They should have learned from the mistakes that are costing the music industry hundreds of millions of dollars. The fact that some studios are shooting themselves in the foot on this one subset of the piracy issue makes me question their ability to deal with the big picture.
Another question, also from Chess:
Who cares if Million Dollar Baby gets one nomination or a hundred? It means nothing anyway. You make it sound like the studio gives a damn. When a crummy award show nod gets you a few million in revenue and piracy gets you billions in lost cash which do you think the studios will focus on?
The problem with this question is that, in a bit of rhetorical Katamari Damacy, it smoothly shifts scales halfway through. An award can add millions in revenue to the gross of a single film; piracy costs billions to the industry as a whole. You’re comparing apples to apple orchards.
For certain films, getting an Oscar, BAFTA, or Golden Globe nod is not just a pleasant bonus; it is an intrinsic part of the business plan. An Oscar can add millions of dollars to a films gross, and studios can spend millions of dollars on Oscar campaigns–Miramax is reputed to have spent $14 million on its campaign for Shakespeare In Love alone. They didn’t do it out of a desire to see a plucky little film recieve artistic recognition; they did it because the cost-benefit analysis made it seem like a sound investment.
I don’t know how much has been spent on “The Life Aquatic,” but I do know the Oscar campaign has involved DVD screeners, ads in the trade magazines, and private screenings for voters. And I also know that–at least in the case of the BAFTAs–that money might have been poured down the drain, because it was entirely undone by a misguided and useless anti-piracy effort.