Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: 2013 Academy Award Theatre Viewings Cancelled?

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Posted by Mark Lensenmayer (Member # 134) on 02-18-2013, 07:26 PM:

Just got a notice from the local MOVIE TAVERN that they must cancel their Academy Award viewing parties. Quoting their Facebook post:

quote:
This action is being taken at the direction of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Are other locations getting such directions from the Academy?

Posted by Martin McCaffery (Member # 37) on 02-18-2013, 07:51 PM:

Were they advertising an "Academy Award" or "Oscar" party without permission from the Academy? They frown on that. Only officially sanctioned parties are allowed to use the trademarked names.

Posted by Mark Lensenmayer (Member # 134) on 02-19-2013, 09:38 AM:

I tracked down some of the advertising for this at some of the other Movie Tavern Locations. They were advertising it as an "Oscar Party" with a graphic of the Academy Award in the background. That is probably why the Academy got involved. They are very protective of their trademark. I don't know why they couldn't just rename it as "Red Carpet Party" or "Awards Party"

Movie Tavern has had some other communication issues lately, as they made a Facebook post last week that seemed to say that their locations were closing, but actually is was just closing a classics run of BLAZING SADDLES.

Posted by Edward Havens (Member # 4715) on 02-19-2013, 12:13 PM:

quote: Mark Lensenmayer
I don't know why they couldn't just rename it as "Red Carpet Party" or "Awards Party"

My understanding is that unless they (or anyone else) are paying a licensing fee or has some other kind of agreement with the license holder (being ABC and The Academy), they do not have the right to broadcast the show, even if they are not charging an admission fee.

Posted by Martin McCaffery (Member # 37) on 02-19-2013, 02:17 PM:

I've heard conflicting information about showing it. Definitely you can't use Oscar or Academy Awards and you can't charge admission. It is my possibly incorrect understanding they Academy will allow you to have a Red Carpet party or some such. I think they only allow one Official party per market.

Posted by Louis Bornwasser (Member # 3063) on 02-19-2013, 02:39 PM:

How is this any different that just having the TV on in a bar?

Posted by Rick Raskin (Member # 1561) on 02-19-2013, 03:36 PM:

I guess it come down to having a TV on is one thing, but advertising with trademarked names is something else.

Posted by Frank Angel (Member # 248) on 02-19-2013, 07:05 PM:

It's all about how much "noise" and visibility you are making about what you are doing. If you have a TV in a bar, you are not shouting from the rooftops that you have a TV or more specifically that you are having an EVENT in your bar based around a specific show, say, THE GOOD WIFE. Depending on how big a profile you publicly display naming names as it were, will be how much risk you run of catching the eye of the producers or CBS. And of course, once they, in this case the Academy or ABC write you a letter, their eye is caught and you are done; yet someone in another part of town might be doing the exact same thing and getting away with it. However, once someone has poked the sleeping Tyrannosaurus Rex ANYWHERE in town, and you've seen them say NO publically, then it behooves everyone else to heed the roar.

I petitioned them last year to run an awards show on our spanking new ECinema projector and at a college....an institute of higher learning with a film school no less and there came from that august academy, a deathly, foreboding silence. I wisely took that silence to mean "You try that, Bub, and you'll be singing in the upper registers."

I didn't even bother to ask this year. So if the students can't watch it in a large group in a theatre setting, they go to their dorm common rooms and watch it 20 or 30 of them at a time on a multitude of smaller screens and they get to see it anyway, only not in a theatre....so how does that "protect" the Academy brand....how does the Academy come out ahead that way? The swine.

Posted by Paul Mayer (Member # 355) on 02-19-2013, 09:42 PM:

Sounds just like the stance the NFL took in Las Vegas with the hotel/casinos hosting "Super Bowl" parties - every hotel here had big screens set up in their convention meeting rooms, with food and drink supplied, free for their best customers. Hotel/casinos that had a multiplex cinema on the property would often have the game put up on one or several screens, again for their invited guests. The NFL put a stop to all of that here starting in 2003 with restrictions on advertising and screen sizes - the first year of the restrictions the limit was 55 inches. I see lately that the hotels are again advertising fairly large screens for these "'big game' parties", on the order of 20 feet or so - perhaps the NFL has become more tolerant of these hotel/casino screenings.

And yes, some places here in town do quietly have AMPAS awards ceremony viewing parties.

Posted by Frank Angel (Member # 248) on 02-20-2013, 10:11 PM:

Don't ask and they won't tell....you not to.

Posted by Scott Jentsch (Member # 1681) on 02-21-2013, 09:52 AM:

Quite a few theaters are hosting events surrounding the Academy Awards broadcast:

http://www.bigscreen.com/Search.php?terms=academy+awards&limit=movies

http://www.bigscreen.com/Search.php?terms=oscar&limit=movies

http://www.bigscreen.com/NowShowing.php?view=all&sort=genre#Program

Unfortunately, there's no normalized entry for all the events, so an interested viewer would need to sift through all the possible variations of "Academy Awards" and "Oscar" and any other more generic name given to the event by each theater.