Is there anyone, anywhere, who thinks that this plan to announce ten Best Picture nominees at the Academy Awards rather than the traditional five is a good idea? Certainly it has occurred to someone at the Academy that if every movie is a contender for Best Picture, then the distinction has no meaning.
What's going to happen next spring is that the Oscars will announce the ten Best Picture candidates, and before the producers of those films even have a chance to congratulate themselves, the story will become which movie didn't get nominated: Up, or Away We Go, or Night at the Museum 2: Another Night at the Museum. No one will much care who did get nominated, because when you're throwing a party that big, the most interesting part is who wasn't invited.
And then by the night of the Big Dance, no one east of Nikki Finke will even be able to remember which ten movies are up for the top prize. Every single person watching the awards ceremony will say to themselves, at least once, "That got nominated? No way." There will be no attendance bounce for any of the nominees. And even the winner will end up being screwy, because when you have people voting from a slate of ten names, the winner is going to be the movie favored by something like 19 percent of the voters. Well, I guess it couldn't be any worse than Crash.
I give this thing two years, tops.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
It's definitely a puzzling move.
There's no guarantee that the other 5 movies nominated will be more popular; it could just as easily bring about 10 movies the Academy members think are dramatically important (and moviegoers don't know or care about).
In the announcement, they said that this was being done in part to make the telecast more exciting -- but trying to squeeze in pieces about five more nominees is just going to make the show longer, not more exciting.
The move has "dumbass" written all over it...
Post a Comment