The Association of Motion Picture Sound congratulates all the nominees at this year’s Oscars.

Filmmakers in all categories contribute to the impact of any film, so the decision by The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to move some categories outside the main event is deeply disappointing. It sends out a signal that these categories are deemed somehow less important which can only serve to create division in the filmmaking community. All the affected categories will suffer from this insensitive devaluing of their contribution.

The Best Sound category was created last year by merging into one the two previous awards given for sound, and at that time a pledge was made to keep the best Sound category in the broadcast event. At a time when the AMPS/CAS/MPSE joint credit initiative is starting to gain momentum this undermines the good work done to acknowledge the significant contribution our skilled and creative sound teams continue to make to cinema.

We feel that sound, film editing, production design or any of the other five categories devalued in this way make no less a contribution than those that are unaffected and we ask The Academy to reconsider this poorly-judged decision.