It's odd talking Oscar when we're in the middle of the Great Transformers Cineplex Domination (though Michael Bay totally has a shot at Best Director of Robot Flatulence), but the Academy slid out some major news today.
Starting this winter, there will be 10-count-'em-10 movies nominated for Best Picture, instead of the five that have been tagged over the past 65 years.
The Awards began in 1928 with three Picture nominees, then up to five the next couple years. In 1932 the field expanded to eight, then to 10 the next year, and went as high as 12 in 1935. It dropped back down to five and stayed there in 1944. (Meanwhile, the Golden Globes nominate 10 films, divided into the Drama and Comedy/Musical Best Film categories.)
So why the change now?
Well, the reason Academy president Sid Ganis gives is what you'd officially expect: Having more nominees means giving more deserving films a moment in the spotlight and gives the voters more to choose from. For example, last year it would have meant that commercial, genre, or animated films such as The Dark Knight and WALL-E would have gotten in the running, as well as Gran Torino.
Which of course also gets at the real reason the Academy is doing it: more mainstream, popular (and financially successful) movies at the Oscars means more viewers. Ratings tend to go up the years when there's a big, popular film nominated, such as Titanic or Return of the King. Just as people are naturally more interested in watching the World Series or Super Bowl when their team is playing, they're more interested in watching awards shows when they're at least familiar with, if not big fans of, the films involved.
And studios will love it, since they will now have more films to market as "Oscar Nominated!" (Of course, studios will also have to pony up more dough to run multiple Oscar campaigns for multiple nominated films.)
Is there a down-side to this expansion? Well, naturally more nominated films means less focus and attention on each of them. And with big-name, popular films now likely to be in the mix, there may be the tendency for the media's pre-awards hype to focus on them to the exclusion of the smaller artier films nominated. One of my defenses of the Oscars is that it pushes lesser-seen films into the media spotlight for a month. That effect may be diluted by a field full of blockbusters.
But ultimately we come back to that old Oscar issue that rears up every January through March: Eh, who cares? It's just a silly, self-congratulatory, Industry back-patting fest, right? Celebrity prom night. If you don't believe the Oscars matter or should matter, then doubling the number of Best-Picture nominees doesn't make them twice as annoying or twice as meaningless. Zero times two is still... zero.
On the other hand, if you get a kick out of seeing both smaller, lesser-known films get their time in the spotlight, and rooting for your favorites, then theoretically the expansion just means more movies to get excited about.
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