The Academy Makes Two Major Changes to the Oscars

July 10, 8:48 AMWilmington Movie ExaminerBernardo Villela

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The Academy Award.

Recently the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences decided to make a few more changes to the Academy Awards, mostly to generate interest. The most significant change was the expansion of the Best Picture category from five films to ten.

For the first sixteen years of its existence the awards did field more than five nominees, however, this move is, strictly speaking, a PR move. It isn't necessarily a bad thing though. Yes, a lot of executives are complaining that their studios will have to spend more money on more films to try and get them nominated, and in this economy who can blame them for complaining but ultimately the general public, who pay too much to watch these movies - even the bad ones, will be the beneficiaries.

Last year there were complaints that most of the nominees were low-budget independent films that few people had seen like The Reader, while big-budget movies which everyone saw and generally liked were snubbed like Iron Man and The Dark Knight. With the field doubled the Academy can attempt to please both the artistic and the average movie-goer and thus, they hope, garner more ratings. And with a more free-flowing format and movies people saw, they just might.

Plus, it's logical. Critics don't make Top five lists they make Top 10 lists. In high school, fed up with the Oscars not representing what I enjoyed in the year, I created my own awards, and last year switched to 10 Best Picture nods because I had never made a Top 10 list. It's not that movies are better now. In fact, cinema's best days will likely always be when there were 5 nominees and you could've picked 20, but it's a change whose time has come.

A change I don't necessarily like is the decision reached a day or two later that stated Best Song may not always be presented if no song scores high enough, and that nominees will fluctuate between two and five based on how well they score - as designated by judging panel. I think this decision is reactionary to two things, one being over-crowding of the category such as this year with two nominees from Slumdog Millionaire, which was sure to win, and another more important reason being not having another Three 6 Mafia incident. I think that may have been a year where they didn't have scores high enough, though Dolly Parton deserved to win.

This complaint is likely to be rendered moot as it seems likely that Nine, the ridiculously asinine musical adaptation of 8 1/2 directed by, for some reason or another, Academy darling Rob Marshall, will garner a few song nominations. The Princess and the Frog, Disney's first hand-drawn animation release in eons will likely include garner nominations as well, Randy Newman is also an Academy favorite, so that's two to four songs right there if my crystal ball isn't foggy.

Either way I feel these changes will both help the show itself, as long as the Best Picture clips don't take up a half an hour of the show and if there's no Best Song that means no singing so that's not a bad thing either.