Sony Conducting No Oscar Campaign For 'Moon'

Moon director Duncan Jones recently voiced his displeasure with Sony Pictures on Twitter regarding the lack of support his film is getting for an Oscar campaign, including the lack of Academy screeners or ads in industry trade magazines. 
Now Movieline is stating a Sony rep cited fear of piracy as a reason for not distributing screeners. Odd, because the studio did distribute screeners to video distributors in advance of the DVD release. I got one.

A representative for the Sony Worldwide Acquisitions Group — which picked Moon up in spring 2008, handed it off to Oscar war horse Sony Pictures Classics in January 2009, then reclaimed it for home-video release this year — acknowledged seeing some of Jones’s grievances. But, he added, the call to avoid Oscar screeners was a business decision as opposed to any lack of support.

“The DVD and Blu-ray come out on Jan. 12 — next Tuesday — and it was felt that to preserve the integrity of the film, we didn’t want to send screeners,” the rep told me. “We’re concerned about piracy. The thing about Moon is that its particular genre is very predisposed toward being uploaded onto the Web. We really just wanted to protect that aspect of it. It’s a simple as that. […] A lot of publicity for Moon is coming out next week. Hopefully that will remind all the consumers, all the readers — and especially any awards folks — that this terrific title is out there.”

full article at Movieline