Rumours are circulating the internet that the winners list for the 81st Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has been leaked. The evidence is a letter supposedly from President of the Academy, Sid Gannis. This blog has no intention of publishing the list but if you are determined to have a look, the letter ‘real or fake’ can be found here.
All the evidence suggests that the list is a fake. Only two partners of the accountancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers are supposed know the results before the envelopes are opened onstage and so the president should not have this information, let alone have committed it to paper. What it demonstrates is that with the surge in peer to peer media and the explosion of user generated content has become very difficult to keep a secret. I hope the letter is a forgery because if it isn’t it is a spoiler in every sense.
The way the web is now we want instant answers. The Academy’s PR machine has shown itself to be as reactively poor as it is pro-actively brilliant. I am sure that they would claim they should not dignify such leaks with a reponse but in an increasingly transparent world that lack of any official word on the Academy website can only fuel the rumours.
PR and the Social Web 