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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

It's Oscar season and there are unauthorized means for evaluating the nominees [torrentfreak.com]:

A few days ago the 2016 nominees [go.com] were announced and as usual this triggered a spike in interest from box office visitors as well as online pirates. The latter group has been spoiled with a steady supply [torrentfreak.com] of pirated titles over the past several weeks. Ironically, many of these titles leaked from DVD screener copies which were sent out to reviewers, including Academy members who vote for the Oscars.

Inspired by the work of Andy Baio [medium.com] early 2015, we decided to take a look at this year's contenders, excluding short and foreign films, to see how many films are already available on pirate sites. To our surprise, all of the 37 nominated movies are widely available through unauthorized sites. Most are released in Blu-Ray or DVD quality, including several DVD screeners.

The list of leaked movies includes Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which is the only movie that's not available in a decent quality. The only copies of the blockbuster are so-called "Cams," recorded in the theater. Due to the low quality the number of Star Wars downloads pales in comparison to other nominees such as The Big Short and The Martian, which have both been downloaded millions of times.

Of all movies that leaked 17 were sourced from DVD screeners. This number of leaked nominee screeners is a record high for this decade. In recent years the number of leaked screener copies was significantly deceased due to increased security measures. However, this trends was broken this year thanks to Hive-CM8 [torrentfreak.com], who released 14 screeners last month.

This year's Oscars are again being criticized [npr.org] for not featuring a racially diverse selection of nominees [npr.org]:

Last week saw the unhappy reprise of #OscarSoWhite [twitter.com], a Twitter hashtag that's becoming something of an annual tradition skewering the lack of diversity in nominations for the Academy Awards. Many fans and critics are frustrated — to say the least — that all of this year's nominees in acting categories are white, citing Michael B. Jordan's performance in Creed as one of a handful of expected shoe-ins for recognition. Now, thousands are pledging to boycott watching the awards ceremony on television, and Jada Pinkett-Smith and Spike Lee have publicly stated that they will not attend.

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