Well look at this… the Academy actually did something really smart. As it says in the title, this coming year the Best Picture category at the Oscars will have TEN nominees competing for the top prize instead of the traditional 5 films.
In the official press release the Academy said their reason for making the movie was to “get back to their roots” since 70 years ago the Oscars did indeed used to have 10 nominees. But let’s call a spade a spade. We all know this isn’t the REAL reason they’re making the change.
The real reasons they’re making this change can be broken down like this:
1) Increasing the number of films nominated will create a wider group of people who are interested in the outcome and hopefully increase the audience for the awards show. Think about it… how many Batman fans out there would have been more interested in the Oscars last year if The Dark Knight had actually been nominated? A LOT.
2) It’s a response to the hammering the Academy took from the main stream film going audience who were outraged that films like “The Dark Knight” and the #1 critically rated film of the year, “Wall-E” were not even nominated. This opens the door for them to include many of those “bubble” films.
3) It makes sense numbers wise. It’s all fine and well to have 5 nominees back in the 80’s when there were about 3000 movies produced each year… but now we have close to 10,000 $1 million+ budget movies made each year. It seems to make sense to broaden the nominee list just in response to the pure numbers.
I’d like to see how the Academy can DARE not nominate “UP” this year.
So what do you think of this move? Good or bad?
