Could "The Hurt Locker" be in jeopardy of losing Oscar votes?

It's Oscar season, and the claws are out. There have long been rumblings of vote lobbying and slandering of rival movies around Oscar season, and this season, The Hurt Locker may be the movie suffering the most.

The drama started with a credits controversy. The Academy has a cap of three producers that are allowed to be credited under a film, but The Hurt Locker has four contributing producers: Director Kathryn Bigelow, screenplay writer Mark Boal, Greg Shapiro, and Nicholas Chartier of Voltage Pictures. The odd man out here is Voltage Picture's Nicholas Chartier. As reported by Nikki Finke, Chartier was a huge financial backer in this film, and he even leveraged his home to fund this film. A riff occurred when tensions erupted among the four, and Nicholas was banned from the set after trying to fire Mark Boal. This is all conjecture and hearsay, though. Who knows what really happened, but what I do know is that Nikki is rarely off the mark. However, Kathryn, Mark, and Greg eventually wrote letters to the Academy and petitioned for Nicholas to be added on as a credited producer.

Hot off the heels of the successful petition, Chartier, for some inexplicable reason, sent a mass email, many of which included Academy members and other influential people in the biz, lobbying for votes.

Chartier's original email: (courtesy LAtimes)

I hope all is well with you. I just wanted to write you and say I hope you liked Hurt Locker and if you did and want us to win, please tell (name deleted) and your friends who vote for the Oscars, tell actors, directors, crew members, art directors, special effects people, if everyone tells one or two of their friends, we will win and not a $500M film, we need independent movies to win like the movies you and I do, so if you believe The Hurt Locker is the best movie of 2010, help us!

I'm sure you know plenty of people you've worked with who are academy members whether a publicist, a writer, a sound engineer, please take 5 minutes and contact them. Please call one or two persons, everything will help!

best regards,

Nicolas Chartier Voltage Pictures

Chartier issued an apology email shortly thereafter, but the damage was already done. Clearly the "$500M film" in question is Avatar. This was an absolute violation of Academy rules, and now The Hurt Locker could be in serious jeopardy of losing votes. This breaks my heart because The Hurt Locker clearly deserves to win best picture at the Oscars. Let's hope voters still get that.

I still can't believe it wasn't already glaringly obvious that this was a stupid thing for Chartier to do. Maybe it was a temporary loss of judgment or bout of insanity, but I really don't get why you'd jeopardize your film's (extremely good) chances of winning. Chartier didn't need to lobby for votes, I'm sure many voters were already convinced themselves.

Cross your fingers.

ETA: Chartier has officially been uninvited from attending this Sunday's Oscars. Yikes.