New York ? Imagine if a few months before the Academy Awards, all the best picture nominees were pulled from the theaters. They weren’t available on DVD, television or cable on demand. Nothing.

The pre-Oscar buzz would shrivel, and none of the Oscar pools and predictions could get off the ground.

A comparable situation exists on a much smaller scale at the Daytime Emmy Awards. Journalists are complaining that access to tapes of Emmy-nominated performances has been shut off, and the National Television Academy won’t even let them know which specific episodes are being judged.

The head of the committee that instituted the ban conceded it was done because some academy members were annoyed at previous years’ stories written about the awards.

But the magazine Soap Opera Weekly discontinued its annual Emmys prediction article last year when the ban took effect, said Mark McGarry, the magazine’s news editor.

“It’s hard to do the predictions when you don’t know the work,” McGarry said.

Many people assume that the Emmy votes are simply popularity contests. Instead, voters are sent tapes of one or two particular episodes of a show and asked to make their judgments based on what they see.

For years, soap opera star Susan Lucci submitted tapes that many critics felt didn’t represent her best work, enabling her to pile up her infamous streak of 18 best actress nominations without a win. That was different in 1999, and after Tom O’Neil, who runs the Web site GoldDerby.com, saw the tape, he predicted it was the year she would finally win. He was right.

Susan Lucci holds the Daytime Emmy statue she waited 19 years to receive during the Daytime Emmy Awards in New York. Lucci won for Best Actress in a Drama Series in 1999.

Academy members are angry at journalists for pointing out flaws that affected how votes were cast in 2002. After not allowing access to the tapes last year, “we found that it really didn’t make a whole lot of difference,” said David Ashbrock, chairman of the awards committee. “We got the same amount of press whether we had people see the tapes or not.”

Other awards shows, like the prime-time Emmys and the Oscars, make it easy for journalists to see nominated work. Some record companies release discs of Grammy-nominated music before that awards show.

Last year, the Daytime Emmys’ audience of 8.4 million was the lowest since the show hit prime-time in 1991. Its peak was 22 million in 1993, according to Nielsen Media Research.

Ashbrock said he promised that the committee would reconsider its ban when it holds its next meeting on May 6 — two weeks before the awards are given out in the televised ceremony from New York’s Radio City Music Hall.

Even if the decision were reversed then, O’Neil said it would give journalists little time to see the tapes and write about them. Ashbrock said he doesn’t think that’s the case, and he’s sticking to his decision.