Hollywood has seen plenty of hack work over the years, but an incident this week raised the hackles of Oscar's caretakers.
On Thursday, Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences exec administrator Ric Robertson said the org had traced the source of alleged Oscar semifinalists that were posted Monday -- the day before nominations were announced -- by Web site writer Harry Knowles on his Ain't It Cool News Web site.
"The list printed by Knowles, which he claimed was an official voting list, was in fact part of a list of guesses made by ABC.com staff in preparation for going online with the actual nominations" the following morning, Robertson said.
One member of the ABC.com team came up with a list of possible nominees and used his home computer to test the site being prepared for Tuesday's announcement.
An investigation is ongoing to discover "how Knowles knew to hack into that particular data base," Robertson said.
Ain't It Cool News, run by Internet movie gossip columnist Knowles, had listed eight nominees in each category, saying it was a preliminary list from which the finalists would be chosen. On the Web site, he said the list came from "deep within the halls of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences."
The list contained some names that wound up with nominations, though many actual nominees were missing.
In a statement, the Acad stressed that ABC had not received any info from the org or from accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers in preparing the list.
Academy spokesman John Pavlik said Acad officials want to determine how the info was obtained from ABC.com before deciding whether to take legal action.
Contact Variety Staff at
news@variety.com