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Drama in the skiesWhy airline movie edits won't win any OscarsBy Barry Neild for CNN  Seat back television screens should remove the need to edit films. QUICKVOTEYOUR E-MAIL ALERTSBUSINESS TRAVELLER
HAVE YOUR SAY
(CNN) -- Spielberg, Clooney and Witherspoon are all in the running, but one winner you won't see at this year's Academy Awards is the airline industry. Every year, thousands of plane passengers while away their journey with a movie -- and more often than not, the film has been edited specifically with in-flight entertainment in mind. These celluloid snips, which occasionally render plotlines hilariously unintelligible, could be seen as an affront to directors and editors who have spent months crafting and fine-tuning their project, but few airlines are willing to take any chances. In the days of overhead TV screens or projectors, the reasons for this were obvious: not all of the captive audience would be happy watching the same film. Steamy sex scenes or violent bloodbaths may be unsuitable for the young or squeamish. But, says Virgin Atlantic's in-flight entertainment director Lysette Gauna, in these days of multi-channel, seat back screens, airlines no longer have the excuse. "How can you take a director's work and re-edit it? It just becomes nonsensical, I wouldn't dare," she told CNN. Virgin -- which with Qantas last year jointly scooped the World Airline Entertainment Association's best in-flight entertainment award -- was one of the first airlines to operate a no-edit policy on films shown on board its jets. "They are the same as you see at the cinema," she says. "I just think its good that people can get on a Virgin plane and see exactly the same film that they would on the ground. We'll be showing the Oscar nominees, and we're pretty sure they'll be very popular." Airline disasters"I've seen some terrible examples of editing, like the classic orgasm scene from When Harry Met Sally or the crucial reveal scene in the Crying Game when you realize the woman is a man. I completely missed the point and came away thinking I'd seen an entirely different movie." Films have been a fixture on aircraft since 1961, when TWA decided to cheer up a New York to San Francisco flight with the distinctly cheerless John Sturges melodrama "By Love Possessed." Since then, virtually all genres of film have been screened in the sky, although for obvious reasons, movies featuring airline disasters have never really taken off -- except on Virgin. "The first film we ever showed was 'Airplane!'" says Gauna, referring the 1980 comedy that spoofs popular jet crash movies. Virgin has also screened "Alive", the 1993 film in which plane wreck survivors in the Andes snack on the corpses of fellow passengers, raising questions about the standards of airline catering. Virgin does draw the line somewhere, however. "We didn't show 'Waterworld,' (the Kevin Costner film set in a waterlogged, future) -- but that's because it was just awful." Says Gauna, her own personal in-flight award winners tend to be the one's that have passengers leaving tears on their inflatable pillows. "I tend to like a really good weepy, I like to look around the plane and see everyone crying at the same thing. I'm sure there'll be plenty of tears when we show 'Brokeback Mountain'." Three recent films you may think twice about watching in the air 
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