Whoops…now the Director’s Guild of America has reportedly decided against permitting distribs to send screeners to individual DGA members, per a “breaking news” announcement on Movie City News. This sounds so priggish, so locoweed. Everyone all over town with any kind of industry connection has screeners sent to them (Oscarwatch’s Sasha Stone says that “the check-out guy at my local Von’s is getting screeners and Rob Reiner isn’t?”) so what’s the DGA’s problem, aside from being flaky and indecisive? I guess we’ll find out soon enough.
The noteworthy things in Poland’s earlier Hot Blog riff on the earlier reported DGA screener policy — i.e., saying it was okay to send them out — were (a) the dissing of L.A. Times reporter Robert Welkos for having buried the “earth-shaking” news about the changed policy about nine paragraphs down (i.e., on the jump page) in his 12.13.06 Envelope-posted story — last Wednesday! — about how industry rank-and-filers see Oscar contenders, and (b) getting in a dig at the Times‘ Oscar-savvy website by writing that “since The Envelope has not become a closely read publication in the industry, most didn’t even see [the story].”