Vote for Ariana Grande- there’s "four figures" in it for you

’Tis the season for laughable critic bribery attempts.

Image: Universal Pictures

On Thanksgiving morning, just a few days before the submission deadline for several of this year’s critics group votes, an email arrived in the inboxes of several members of the Critics Choice Association, offering to pay them off, “in the four-digit range,” if they were to name Ariana Grande on their awards ballot, in the Best Supporting Actress category.

Here’s one version of the email, as shared on social media by Carlos Aguilar:

A few things to make clear, about this:

1. While I’m a Critics Choice Association voting member, I did not receive this email. Should I be insulted about this? I don’t know. It does seem like most of the people who got the email have surnames at the beginning of the alphabet, so I don’t know, maybe the emailer went through the membership roster and got bored and gave up at some point.

2. I would highly, highly doubt that this is a legitimate offer of bribery, at least from anyone directly associated with Ariana Grande, the movie Wicked, or Universal Pictures. I don’t think anyone professionally engaged with a legitimate Oscar campaign would be dumb enough to try to pull something like that, or at least to put it in an email to a group of journalists.

3. As near as I can gather, no one who got the email took them up on the offer or even replied to the emailer to try to find out who was offering it. This, I would say, speaks well of my colleagues, although most people seemed more amused by the whole thing than anything else.