They’re Investigating the Case of the Missing Oscar Ballots

With great fanfare, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences staged a “photo op” for the news media last Wednesday, where it displayed the final Oscar ballots before they were mailed to thousands of academy members throughout California.

Then the accounting firm of PricewaterhouseCoopers took the 4,200 ballots, which were stuffed in eight gray mail sacks, and delivered them to the back loading dock of the Beverly Hills Post Office.

But on Saturday night, when academy members arrived at their black-tie and gown Scientific and Technical Awards at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills, some members asked each other if they had received their ballots yet. No, they were told, no one had.

Academy officials contacted the U.S. Postal Service this week to inquire what had happened to the “missing” Oscar ballots and an investigation was immediately launched.

What the postal service discovered Tuesday might prove a minor embarrassment for the academy and PricewaterhouseCoopers, which has the task of tabulating the Oscar votes--or, it could just be a routine mix-up by the postal service.

Even though the academy had placed the ballots in envelopes with first-class, 33-cent postage, the postal service said the sacks were not labeled and, thus, were thought to contain third-class mail, which typically takes seven to eight days to deliver.

“The mail was in sacks that were not labeled,” said Terri Bouffiou, a spokesperson for the postal service. “The mail was processed in our system. It was taken to the mail processing center in Marina del Rey, but because it was in unlabeled gray sacks, it went through our system as third-class mail.”

She said that, typically, third-class mail is sent from Marina del Rey to the postal service’s bulk mail center in Bell, but since these sacks were not labeled, they would go back to the L.A. processing center in South-Central Los Angeles, where each piece of mail would be processed individually.

Had the academy clearly marked the bags as first-class mail, Bouffiou said, they should have been delivered the next day.

But academy spokesman John Pavlik said Tuesday that they always send out their mail in gray sacks. “We haven’t had a problem with our regular first-class mail,” he said. “We have never used anything but gray mailbags for our mail.”

By Tuesday, the postal service said it had tracked down some of the mail, but the academy said it appeared “pretty sure” it would have to immediately send out another mass mailing. Pavlik noted that about 1,400 academy members living out of state have already received their ballots.

To avoid duplications, members will be asked to mail back ballots in new yellow envelopes--the original envelopes are white and contain a different number sequence, Pavlik said. The Academy Awards will be held March 26 at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. The ballots must be returned by March 21.