More in the NY Times today about the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences move to increase the number of Best Picture nominees from 5 to 10.
The move wasn’t about movies because the academy, in spite of its name, is not in the movie business: it is in the television business. The lion’s share of its revenue is derived from the glittering annual television show. And in the last 10 years, the Oscars has lost millions of viewers and may no longer merit the premium advertisers have been asked to pay.
But in attempting to juice up the TV ratings and with them TV advertising revenue, the Academy may have some secondary consequences like even more obscure, arty films being nominated that are unlikely to draw the more casual viewers the telecast needs.
But who is to say that the academy, granted double the number of slots, will not be inclined to drill deeper into specialized movies rather than cast wider nets that might snare a blockbuster? Sure, if there were 10 nominations last year, “Wall-E” might have made the cut, but so, too, might “Frozen River” and “The Visitor,” two tiny movies with small but fervent followings.
And the most interesting consequence to me is the possibility that with 10 potential Best Picture vote getters, that theoretically only 10%+1 vote could determine the winner (as opposed to 20%+1 in the past).
The new math created by the doubling of best-picture possibilities while every other category stays at five means that a film will need to persuade 10 percent of the voting academy plus one more person that it was the best movie of the year. Niches could continue to rule, with smallish academy guilds like art directors, or special constituencies like British members of the academy, pushing through a particular movie crush that had left many others unmoved. The winners could well be cinematic gems like “The Hurt Locker,” but not crowd-pleasers like “The Hangover.”
All in pursuit of the grail of TV ratings and advertising!
via NYTimes.com.
The point about the British community in Hollywood is a good one. I am an anglo-phile but there’s no denying that a lot of them will stick together and push their agreed upon fave. If only Merchant and Ivory were still doing their thing, they could clean up.
This doesn’t really do much to solve the primary problem that plagues the Oscars though – the monotony of the nominations and invariably the winners all essentially coming from the same core group of five or six films and there’s no real way to stop that. Some variation from category to category would be much more appealing to me than increasing the number of nominees for Best Picture.
On another note I heard someone suggest that the Oscars should introduce a ‘knockout’ phase to the Best Picture award and essentially eliminate five of the ten nominees throughout the night to try and spice the show up a little and so when it gets to the end of the night there are once again five final nominees. That could be trainwreck fantastic.
Alex, to do it justice that needs a full 6 episode Hell’s Kitchen style contest to whittle it down to a final four.
Next week on the most controversial episode of “Best Picture” ever:
“Christopher Nolan, sure, your little movie made truckloads of cash, but your editing is PATHETIC! DONKEY! You needed to cut out 45 minutes more to keep people over 60 (the voting audience?) watching. Their brains told them to SHUT IT DOWN! Tell me, why should ‘The Dark Knight’ stay in contention?
I never watch the Academy Awards, but I would watch that contest, and then probably would watch the awards show, too. It will never ever happen, but it’s fun to think about. Given the sensitive creative types, I doubt they’d even go for the “Knockout” phase during the awards show either, though I’m sure adding elements to play up the competition between nominees wouldn’t be bad for ratings.
I too think that the new lineup of 10 will increase the average number of art films in contention to ~8. However, even one or two Ups (or what have you) should be enough to raise ratings.
On the other hand, the worry that the nomination will now be limited to 10 art films is overstated. As others have pointed out, The Academy has the old ballot results, for 6 – 10. If the end result would still be pure art films, they wouldn’t have made the change.
Now, that the larger field means various constituencies (civil rights, British, anti-war) can lock in their winner is a serious concern – but probably irrelevant in terms of ratings (Joe Average not watching the full acceptance speech for “The Black British Woman Protests The Iraq War” won’t change total ratings much).
That said, they seriously need to pare down the show now. Lose the musical numbers forever, cut down the endless montages, demote Sound (vs. Music) awards to the technical ceremony, etc.
Let’s just call it the “Dark Knight” ruling because that’s what it is. The expanded count means that some bigger pictures usually shut out due to snob appeal will now have a chance. Also, comedy tends to fall just outside the 5 count. This may allow for a few esteemed comic works to be honored as they were during Hollywood’s golden age.
I think we haven’t yet heard from the “guilds”. Directors and Writers. I’m betting they, particularly the the directors, (writer’s at least get 10 nominations by viture of original and adapted screenplays) will demand 10 nominations making the resulting Oscar telecast even more tedious.
Apparently, i’m supposed to be dumb enough now to actually believe that just because a big hit summer movie from this year, presumably UP, is one of 10 nominees for best picture it actually has a shot in hell at winning?
I’m not that dumb. Every year, there’s going to be the one huge hit that John Q. Public loved that’s going to get a Best Picture nom, as Buddy said above it would’ve been The Dark Knight last year (and probably Wall-E too), and every year there will be some huge deal made out of the fact that this big summer blockbuster hit was nominated, and then the Slumdog Millionaire’s of the world will come along and win everything. (Slumdog was not the Best Picture of last year, it was good, certainly, but The Wrestler and Gran Torino were far better. Hell, Wall-E was probably better too if the Academy didn’t harbor some sort of Pixar bias) That’s the Oscars of the future, because that’s going to happen every year. In about year or two, people will realize that and ratings will go back to declining at the rate they were declining before.
Thank you for reading my outrage. I’m done ranting now. Lol.
It’s not just UP that would get a nomination. Mark my word either Star Trek or Harry Potter would also be nominated.
Amen, Jesse. I couldn’t have said it better myself.
Star Trek was suuuch an entertaining movie though. I don’t mind it being nominated to recognized it’s larger-than-life quality status, especially since it has no chance of winning. Plus, if a movie like Star Trek was nominated, it would just boost revenue for the industry since people would naively believe that it was worthwhile to go see since it was nominated for best picture.