I find the whole Academy Award thing completely useless. Who cares about something irrelevant as Academy Awards. The only important thing is the current and future audience, for which these films should be preserved.
If you had won one and then had the reason you won it for erased you might feel differently.
Disney / Fox won’t care though. A lot of what I have read here is based off of emotion and nostalgia, not reason and fact. The distributor does not care about how you feel AT ALL. How do I know this? I am a home video distributor, albeit a small cult one. When I restore a film, I do it out of personal love, not because fan encouragement, though it can be a factor.
On a corporate level, you will seldom find this. They restore films because there is a market. While there IS a market for the ORIGINAL Original Trilogy, it’s not a big one. This may not seem to be the case, but I firmly believe it’s true. The Blu-rays still sold heaps, and they were some of the worst transfers to ever hit the medium (namely TPM and ESB). They are certainly not losing money by releasing the Special Editions, are they?
They could potentially lose money by releasing the originals though (unless paired with the SEs), and that’s probably what has kept them from doing so lately – not because of Lucas. They hear the fans, but it’s not their priority as it’s not a big money-maker right now. Additionally, it’s a lot of time and money to be put towards “unfinished” films. I hate to say it, but it seems to be the case.
My two cents.
Exactly. People here tend to be unrealistic when they estimate OOT market. Like you said, why would they put any effort when they can just re-release SE and get the same (or even better) effect. Even people around here are still buying every SE they release.
And like I said many times, when you are making billions with something, you do not care about something that might make a few millions.