A staggeringly wordy report just came out of Deadline stating that The Academy Awards are slowly but surely going to be transitioning over to an online voting system, like their SAG and Writers Guild counterparts. It will not be a quick process and will not be ready for the upcoming awards early next year, but according to Academy Prez Tom Sherak, AMPAS is hoping to have a firm in place to handle the online voting by the end of this month, leaving a lot of time to iron out the kinks before they first implement the system.

Part of their changeover method will be to still provide paper ballots to the voters that request them to accommodate the folks that aren’t ready to drop the Scantron voting sheet and pencil. However, a whopping 83% of Academy voters said they’re on board for a switch to digital which is shocking considering the age of some of the voters. Sherak is hopeful about the process, but is well aware of the obvious impending threat of hackers.

The most widely publicized, at least in my nerd kingdom, account of hacking occurred recently when George Hotz, AKA GeoHot, took down Sony’s PS3 network for over a month. Why’d he do it? For the lulz, of course. And now that he’s safely secure in his new job at Facebook, we don’t have him to worry about any more. But what about the legion of other hackers out there who want that kind of fame for breaking something that big down? Deadline provided this quote from an Academy voter:

It's not a bad idea to go online, but what kid with a computer is not gonna want to play around and try to fuck up the Oscars. It's also tough jolting an old institution which doesn't embrace change that easily.

Going digital is the natural way for voting to go for the Academy Awards. Distributors are already providing their movies via download rather than spending the enormous amount of money it would take to print screeners off and ship their films to voters. It would also provide the advantage of not having to end voting until much closer to the actual ceremony air date, as well as allow them to hold the ceremony earlier in the year. But can they keep the hackers out?

There are certainly people out there who have a vendetta against the Oscars with their relentless back-pattery and parading of rich people, so if any one of them has a working knowledge of hacking, they could pretty easily have Brats 2 on stage winning best picture. Honestly, I’d be more interested to see someone hack the ceremony so that instead of being played off by the orchestra, award recipients get interupted by keyboard cat. Now that would be something.

Ultimately, the Oscars are going to go digital regardless of what hacker presence may try to stop them. Eventually they’ll all get bored or one of them will get hired to keep the others out, and it won’t be fun for them any more. Until then, as someone who loves the Oscars, I’m hoping the weather remains clear on their path to the internet.