Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Film More Oscars! Kinda.
Posted by Benjamin Sutton on Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 1:59 PM
Crazy ridiculous news out of Hollywood like just now: from now on the Academy Awards will feature 10 (rather then 5, as there have been for the last 70 years) films nominated for the "Best Picture" statue. Somehow this is supposed to make the awards more exciting and keep people watching, but obviously the wrong films will continue to take the big prize. I guess, too, this means more mediocre movies can add the precious "Best Picture Nominee" to their advertising materials. Read a tiny bit more (like, two lines more) about the decision over at Variety.
Comments (3)
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That's really ridiculous. They couldn't pick 10 great movies that could even be nominate for the award probably. It totally detracts from the entire concept of the Oscars. Bah.
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Five is actually the number of nominees for the past 70 or so years, not 81 -- this is actually a revival of how they did it through much of the thirties.
On one hand, picking five movies instead of ten seems arbitrary when most critics deal in ten-best lists, and having ten instead of five increases the likelihood of recognition of the types of movies that should've been nominated but were just a little too entertaining (Dark Knight, Wall-E, Almost Famous) or a little too smart/arty (Eternal Sunshine, Children of Men, Zodiac). It could also theoretically up the vote-splitting/unpredictability factor.
But as others have pointed out, if you have ten Best Picture nominees and keep everything else at five, well, then, the frontrunners will be pretty obvious if you look at the Best Director nominees. But having ten of everything would be overkill (and really, there are already ten lead and supporting performances, split by gender, and ten screenplays, split by adapted/original).
