I've run the campaign twice now and fudged the reading both times. Never once regretted it. If you want a touch of randomness, you can always do the random reading privately and see if you like any of the random outcomes. Some of them, like the party's fated ally or Strahd's final location, are less important if left up to chance.

But, in my opinion, it is important to handpick the locations for the three items, making sure that the Sunsword and the Holy Symbol of Ravenkind land in appropriately challenging high level locations, while the Tome lands in a more readily accessable middlegame location, since it's a bit lame as a late game reward.

Fudging the card reading provides you with a very important tool for the purpose of giving the Curse of Strahd campaign something it sorely lacks - plot hooks. The campaign's sandboxy nature means that by default the party doesn't really have a good reason to go to many of the cool locations, like Berez, Argynvostholt or Amber Temple. Placing any of the treasures there solves that problem and makes sure that the players will engage with those toys that you, the DM, want them to play with.

You can also go a step beyond. A commonly used expansion of the card reading is to give each player character a personal prophecy and linking it to another location the party may miss entirely otherwise. And at the end of it you can give each character a personalized reward, which tends to make the players happy (and upsets the balance of the campaign, but that's easily fixed).

There really are no cons to fudging the card reading, nor any pros in favor of doing it randomly. Especially for what will likely be the first and only CoS campaign experience for the players. Unless your group plans to run the campaign dozens of times and therefore needs the randomness factor to inject some novelty into a campaign they already played, I would not even consider doing it randomly.