10 Best Picture Nominees?!

by HELEN GEIB

This past Wednesday the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced that the Academy Awards Best Picture category will double in size next year from five to ten nominated films. The prevailing interpretation of the thinking behind this change is that it’s a desperate attempt to improve Oscar’s ratings by packing the top category with audience favorites. Adding Best Picture nominees won’t make the awards show any shorter – excessive length being one of the most frequently cited complaints by people who have and people who haven’t been watching the broadcast the last few years – so it’s tempting to read the subsequently announced sideways move by the honorary career-achievement award to a separate event as a temporal offset.

Given that even the Academy acknowledges it’s enlarging the nominee pool in hopes of boosting ratings, then the question becomes whether fiddling with the Best Picture category is likely to further that goal. The article I read on the press conference in my local paper quoted Academy president Sid Ganis justifying the change because more great movies were released last year than could fit into five slots. True or false, the point is irrelevant. I didn’t hear any laments that there was only room for these five nominees. I heard complaints that the wrong films were nominated – two or three or four of the wrong films.

Call it “the Dark Knight effect.” Or if you’re more inclined to indie films than Hollywood fare, “the Wrestler effect.” There aren’t many people who would argue The Curious Case of Benjamin Button has the staying power of The Dark Knight, or who don’t think that The Wrestler takes Frost/Nixon to the mat.

From the Academy’s perspective, the best Best Picture nominees are the films that garnered both critical and popular acclaim, that elusive nexus of a high score on the internet review aggregator sites and $100 million-plus in box office receipts. The next best thing is the small films the critics raved about – the ones that made all the top ten lists. The first type buys audience interest without sacrificing credibility, while the second at least preserves credibility. Last year’s uninspiring slate had three films that weren’t especially well-reviewed, and only one of those even offered the compensation of being in the $100 million club. Ignoring audience favorites is one thing; slighting them for movies that inspired lukewarm to hostile feelings in audiences and critics is something else entirely.

So will The Dark Knight and The Wrestler of 2009, and perhaps even the Tropic Thunder and Iron Man, make the cut now? The next The Wrestler, sure. With ten slots available, there’s room for another highly praised indie drama. But will Academy voters really repress a shudder and vote for well-reviewed movies that make a lot of money even though they’re based on comic books or get laughs skewering Oscar’s very own sacred cows? Or will next time be last time twice over? Academy members will still not see many movies in the theater, will still have short memories, will still vote for their friends and to advance their political and social causes, will still have a soft spot for biopics and literary adaptations and backstage dramas.

Mr. Ganis went on to say that the change will open the field to foreign and animated films and documentaries. We can call this “the Wall-E effect” or, taking the long view, “the Hoop Dreams effect.” The question here is why films that already have their own “best in category” award need to be considered for Best Picture too, and whether it’s really the right choice to argue that they should be.

In the case of foreign films, widening the Best Picture frame is potentially a very good thing. The foreign-language film category is a special case. The Academy’s nominating procedure – films are submitted for consideration by foreign governments, one submission per country – means that many fine films are left off the list because of politics, personality, and stiff domestic competition. The possibility that some of the “ineligible” films could receive Best Picture nominations is a happy one, although I won’t hold my breath waiting for it to happen.

Animated films and documentaries are another matter. Considering an especially popular example of the type for Best Picture every once in a while only feeds the perception that animated and documentary films are, as a class, inferior to regular feature films. I’m sympathetic to partisans’ desire to see their favorite films recognized, especially in years when the competition in the best picture category is weak, but it does the larger cause no favors to argue that being named the best animated film or the best documentary isn’t good enough. Better to argue that it is, and make no apologies for not being considered Best Picture material. They’re in good company, after all.