02/28/2001

Associated Press

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. – Attention Academy Awards voters: Your Oscar ballots are in the mail. And this time, Oscar overseers expect them to arrive.

About 4,300 ballots went out Thursday for members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences who live in California. Roughly 1,400 ballots for members outside California were mailed last week.

A year ago, ballots for California academy members got lost in the mail. The academy invalidated them, sent out new ones and extended the voting deadline by two days.

The missing ballots eventually turned up at a postal facility in a Los Angeles suburb, where they had been mistakenly mixed in with bulk mail shipments.

Oscar organizers traditionally have dropped off the ballots in canvas sacks at the Beverly Hills post office.

"The post office, to make sure it didn't happen again, came and picked them up this time,'' Robert Rehme, academy president, said Thursday.

The lost ballots were the first of several Oscar problems last year. A shipment of 55 Oscar statues were stolen off a loading dock, with all but three recovered later. Days before the awards show, The Wall Street Journal ran a story attempting to predict the outcome of the Oscars, based on interviews the newspaper did with academy members.