The day after the award show ‘the hurt locker’ was the most typed in search phrase on BitTorrent, with ‘hurt locker’ ending up in ninth place. This increased demand was also reflected in the download numbers which skyrocketed. Since its win at the Oscars the film has been downloaded well over a million times.

Interestingly, The Hurt Locker was already available online in high quality for more than a year, and months before it premiered in movie theaters in the United States. The film’s screener leaked in February of last year, but it has never generated as many downloads as it did this week. Thanks to the Oscar boost, the total number of Hurt Locker downloads on BitTorrent are now nearing 10 million.

The sudden rise in demand is of course not limited to BitTorrent and other file-sharing networks. A film that does well on BitTorrent is usually doing well at the box-office or in the movie stores too, and indeed, DVD sales for The Hurt Locker went up at an equal rate.

This week the DVD topped the bestseller list at the online retailer Amazon and Director of Sky Box Office, Ian Lewis, reports a “significant increase” in demand on its Sky Box pay-per-view service. Similarly, the number of theaters playing the film is doubling this weekend to accommodate the ‘Oscar Bounce.’

The Hurt Locker was not the only Oscar winner to see a boost in unauthorized downloads after last Sunday. Crazy Heart, The Blind Side and Precious and Up saw a similar but less pronounced upswing.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

In anticipation of the glamorous Oscar night, we enter the dark side of the movie business to find out which of the 10 nominees in the Best Picture category gets the vote from BitTorrent users. NewTeeVee asked us to rank the nominees by number of downloads and the results are finally in.

If every download on BitTorrent counted as a vote, District 9 would be crowned the winner, closely followed by Avatar. The least popular films according to the BitTorrent public are The Blind Side with 1,845,000 downloads and An Education with ‘only’ 683,000 downloads.

We have to note that comparing the downloads of each of the nominees is not really fair since some films have been available online for more than a year already, while others only leaked a few weeks ago. Avatar, which is second in the list with 11,326,000 downloads, became available in DVD-quality a month ago, while District 9 was already widely available last September.

As usual, all the nominated films are available online in various formats. For District 9 2,948 unique torrent files were counted, but the majority of these are inactive or have very few downloaders. Avatar beats District 9 in terms of availability with 4,280 torrent files.

The data for this list is collected by TorrentFreak from several sources, including reports from all the large BitTorrent trackers. All release formats, including cammed versions, are counted. Afterwards, the data was carefully checked and possible inaccuracies were systematically corrected.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The statistics for all 2010 nominees, except documentary and foreign films, show that 27 of the 34 films were available on BitTorrent in DVD quality last night. Nearly half of the films have leaked as a screener and 10 of those are estimated to be leaked by Academy members.

Although the majority of the Oscar nominees are available online, the movie industry has certainly scored a small victory. Last year all films leaked in one format or another. On another positive note for the MPAA, the median time for films to leak after their US-release date has nearly doubled to 21 days. In 2003 it took only one day for most films to leak onto the Internet.

On the negative side, there were still 4 films that were available online before they they premiered in US movie theaters. In The Loop, The Hurt Locker, The White Ribbon and The Young Victoria all leaked in advance of their official premiere.

The graph below further shows that there are less retail DVD rips available compared to previous years, 44% versus 100% in 2008 and the years before. As Andy also mentions, this figure may go up a little before the official Oscar award ceremony broadcast.

Although this data suggests that the movie industry is becoming more effective in preventing screeners from leaking online, we have to emphasize that more than a third of the leaks originated from deviant Academy members who like to share the work of their colleagues.

The Oscar screener of Avatar was sent out relatively late, only a few weeks ago. It leaked onto the Internet today and is not included in the graphs above.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.