Last Night's Academy Awards: Not on YouTube

Last year, I wrote about how the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences requested that YouTube yank any clips from the Oscar telecast...and yet the official Oscar site didn't offer much video to Oscar-obsessed Internet users.

The same thing is happening this year. Oscar.com offers mostly footage from the "thank you" cam, a backstage opportunity for winners to be more profuse in their gratitude.

And on YouTube, nearly all clips from the telecast are being zapped almost immediately. (Someone posted the "In Memoriam" tribute to actors who died in 2007, and it was removed within about 12 minutes.) I wonder if this is YouTube's automatic content filtering software at work...

People clearly want to watch the few highlights of the telecast that are available on YouTube. (A clip of the song 'Falling Slowly' from 'Once,' which hasn't been removed yet, has been seen more than 37,000 times.)

The Academy did launch an official YouTube channel this year (you can find it here), but today it contains only clips from previous Oscar shows, promo spots, interviews with Academy members, and Sid Ganis' pre-Oscars video blog.