By Jim McCarthy Jan 28, 2009 0 comments

How Not to Be a Live 2.0 Organization, MPAA Edition

Step one:  sue people who are trying to sell your tickets on the secondary market.  Obviously, opinions vary on the pluses and minuses of the secondary market among people in the live biz, but suing people selling your tickets is insane.

Step two:  call the people who don’t happen to be famous and powerful movie biz types but who would like to come to the Oscars potential stalkers and terrorists, which is the MPAA’s explanation for why they don’t want anyone buying tickets that they haven’t invited.  There’s another name for those people:  fans.

Step three:  To paraphrase an old iMac commercial, there’s no step three.  Just those two steps are enough.

But let’s turn this around.  The Oscars is a major live event, after all.  Can we get the MPAA on the path to being a Live 2.0 organization in just two steps?  Of course we can:

Step one:  Make 20% of the Kodak Theatre available for sale to the general public at the Oscars.  Even better, work a system so that everytime a person buys a movie ticket in a theatre (you’d have to get the exhibitors to join in, obviously), there’s a code you redeem online which represents a raffle ticket for one of these spots.  Let the lucky fans walk up the red carpet and treat them like mini-celebrities for the night.  That way, you can celebrate the movie industries fans while you celebrate yourself, which can be unseemly.

Step two:  Create a “Audience” category for Academy membership.  Currently, you have to be in the business in a credentialed way to vote, but if you could similarly qualify people as members of the Academy on the basis of their being fans, you’d do a lot of good in building the stature of the Awards again.  Make 20% of the Academy’s membership be made up of highly motivated movie goers and give them a vote.  In recent years, the tastes of the Academy’s members seem to be diverging quite a bit from the tastes of the movie-going public.  (I’m not saying “No Country for Old Men” wasn’t a good movie, but…)  If that continues, it’s a long-term threat to the relevance of the Awards.  This would bring it back into sync and give lots and lots of people a reason to watch and engage.

I’m excited!  When do I get my ballot?

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