Status wise it's a bad thing.
In what alternate reality? Every prominent politician, and every substantial business or other organisation, has people whose whole job is what you scorn as "attention whoring". It's more usually called something like "publicity", "press department", or "outreach", and I hope MIRI spends a significant number of man-hours on it. Telling people about yourself is a fundamental prerequisite for people knowing about you and whatever cause or business purpose you are trying to pursue. (There are ways of doing this badly, but the surest way of doing it badly is to be resentful at having to do it at all.)
So, MIRI needs to have more than just a comment ready. They need to be able to supply anyone who asks with a whole position paper relating to the film, and where relevant, work references to it into their publicity material, at such time as the actual content of the movie becomes clear. (And there are ways of doing this badly, but etc.)
The journalist might never come knocking, but when opportunity knocks, it is too late to prepare for it. Not doing this for fear of "attention whoring" and people thinking them "low status" would be shooting themselves in the foot. And why would that journalist come knocking? Because the publicity department of the production company has been publicising the film months in advance, and because MIRI has made itself prominent enough to be known to at least one journalist as having something to say on the subject.
I agree with you that it's important to be prepared; the attention whoring referred specifically to commenting on the movie before it comes out, and it's plot and "statement" (if there is one) becomes clear.
There's a big Hollywood movie coming out with an apocalyptic Singularity-like story, called Transcendence. (IMDB, Wiki, official site) With an A-list cast and big budget, I contend this movie is the front-runner to be 2014's most significant influence on discussions of superintelligence outside specialist circles. Anyone hoping to influence those discussions should start preparing some talking points.
I don't see anybody here agree with me on this. The movie has been briefly discussed on LW when it was first announced in March 2013, but since then, only the trailer (out since December) has been mentioned. MIRI hasn't published a word about it. This amazes me. We have three months till millions of people who never considered superintelligence are going to start thinking about it - is nobody bothering to craft a response to the movie yet? Shouldn't there be something that lazy journalists, given the job to write about this movie, can find?
Because if there isn't, they'll dismiss the danger of AI like Erik Sofge already did in an early piece about the movie for Popular Science, and nudge their readers to do so too. And that'd be a shame, wouldn't it?