Oscar's cash grab

Step right up and spend your $2 million bucks. The major movie studios will be falling all over themselves to do just that now that they'll be able, for the first time in the 50-some years of Oscarcasts, to put their trailers on live TV during Hollywood's biggest night. No brainer, right?

Not so fast.

Granted, it is the perfect match-up of product and audience, a chance to sell movies to ardent fans gathered to watch the year's creme of the crop collect some trophies. And it's one of the few marquee, TiVo-proof events left on the TV dial. (Like the Super Bowl, but with less than a third of the viewers).

But there are a number of caveats attached by Oscar's brand steward, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, some understandable and others needlessly strident, that might make this expensive media buy (somewhere upwards of $1.8) potentially not so attractive after all.

The cynics among us would just call it a money grab by the Academy. But that sounds a little harsh, doesn't it?

It was suggested to Gold Rush this week, just as this news broke, that the Academy should be doing everything it possibly can to encourage movie-going at a time when attendance is down. A former studio marketing chief even said each studio should get a spot -- for free!

He certainly has a point. Ain't gonna happen, but we appreciate where he's coming from.

See the full guidelines here which, by the way, are more detailed and strict than for any other advertiser buying spots during the three-hour show.

These are the two rules we're stuck on: ads must be new -- never seen elsewhere -- and must hype movies that launch in late April, two months after the Feb. 22 awards program.

Why are these unrealistic? Read on.

Here's why marketers premiere new ads during the Super Bowl: tonnage. More than 90 million men, women and children (grandma and grandpa, too!) will see them, and that's just during the game. In other words, it pays to spend huge chunks of change to create the likes of Apple's 1984. (Ads cost as much as $3 million during last year's game, which doesn't count how much scratch it took to build them).

Oscar's audience is not as populous or as populist. Sure, the Academy wants to try to draw in more viewers with the promise of exclusive movie bits, but you can't legislate excitement. (See: last year's record-low ratings, following a steady slide in viewership).

And next: No ads for movies opening before late April. Two months away? Why two months? Unless it's a teaser as brain-searing as the one for the summer tentpole "Independence Day" during the Big Game several years back, chances are slim that people will remember that spot when the movie's released. That, then, is money wasted for most anything that opens beyond May.

As we write, studios could already be queuing up for the available ad time, though our chats around town indicate many are in business school mode, asking, "What's the ROI here?"

Smart move. But as the pressure mounts -- from filmmakers who want that high-profile showcase to age-old competitors who can't stand to be "outdone" -- we'll see who blinks.