Penalties for going over budget would be determined by the academy, which needs to put more teeth in its punishments anyway. Simply taking away Oscar ceremony tickets isn't that big a deal: Most people in the industry dread sitting through that interminable show anyway and welcome any excuse to miss it. But threatening to remove a film from Oscar consideration might not be too draconian.

2) The buck stops where?

The nanosecond that the final Academy Award envelope is opened and the best picture announced, the jockeying for the next year's Oscar officially begins. After all, key ad placement for the Hollywood trade papers is practically booked the day after. By summer, strategies are at full throttle. In the fall, hours if not weeks of discussions take place among film company executives, producers, agents, managers, lawyers and publicists about which talent should be nominated in which categories. And so on, ad nauseam.

It is understandable, then, that Oscar campaign teams are bigger than Third World armies, consisting not just of in-house publicity machines but outside public relations and marketing consultants or agencies ranging from one-man offices to worldwide combines.

Depending on who won and who lost last time out, the best and brightest of these promoters-for-hire are put under contract within days of the Oscar telecast. It's the same clique year after year. Some are young and hungry go-getters who attack Oscar with the same no-holds-barred manner that wild animals go after fresh meat. Others are geriatric flacks whose heydays were in decades past, who can't see a film all the way through without catnapping, and who are employed merely because they're contemporaries of the geezers who make up a too-substantial portion of the academy's 5,732 voting members.

In recent years, whenever a studio has been accused of an Oscar campaigning sin -- like bad-mouthing someone else's picture or floating a false rumor -- the first response has been deny, deny, deny. Then it's blame, blame, blame. Inevitably that falls first on the executive who complained about it, or the journalist who uncovered it, instead of the person who committed it. Too often, the culprit is an outside independent contractor demonstrating what is described as "overzealousness." An apology usually follows.

As a result, the studios' paid outside agitators promulgate a vicious cycle of dirty tricks, while the executives get to keep their hands clean. At the very least, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences should decree that each moviemaker is responsible for the actions of everybody on a film's payroll, including anyone who transgresses. In other words, the movie's studio will be penalized even if wrongdoing is unmasked by an outside independent contractor. In a situation where two films may be involved -- say an actress hires a personal publicist to campaign for her performances in two movies she appeared in that year -- both studios must accept punishment. Part of the penalty assessed must include a public announcement of the wrongdoing to the media.

If this sounds like a sneaky way to start limiting the use of outside publicists and marketers in Oscar campaigns, it is. Sure, they're allowed to earn a living just like everyone else, but some are truly out of control. It's time to rein them in -- and the only way to do that is to make the studio that hired them pay for their mistakes.

3) Those who vote must also sit and watch

You might think that, given the film industry's reputation for cutting-edge technology, the academy would by now have developed a foolproof system to ensure that its members have properly screened all the Oscar-eligible feature films. In fact, there's none in place.

Instead, the academy lulled itself into a false sense of security by agreeing that its voting membership can judge the movies by watching them on videocassette, and now on DVD, in the comfort of their homes, instead of in the theaters where they were intended to be viewed. I know too many Academy members who all last year did not set foot into a cineplex -- not because of age or infirmity but because of laziness and privilege. This noxious habit of judging Oscar worthiness based on how a movie plays on a TV screen is an affront to the motion picture art form.

The videocasettes were first allowed in order to encourage academy voters to see as many of the eligible films as possible. It hasn't worked. At least during an academy-sponsored theater screening, voters must overcome the public shame of walking out in the middle of a film in front of their academy colleagues; but in the privacy of a voter's home, who's to know if that videocassette was ejected after 10 minutes, or even never put into the VCR at all?

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