What John Thinks...of the change to the Oscar Best Picture race

When I first heard about the Academy Awards expanding its Best Picture race to include 10 movies instead of five, I have to admit - I thought it was pretty great.

Finally, quality blockbusters (meaning movies that regular people actually watch) would get their shot at a prize more prestigious than a People’s Choice or an MTV Movie Award. This change even has precedent: in the 1930’s and 40’s the Oscars had anywhere from eight to 12 Best Picture nominees (that’s your movie trivia tidbit of the day).

However, the more I think about this new development, the less I like it.

My main problem is that this has a strong whiff of COPOUT. Instead of simply recognizing that films like "Wall-E" and "The Dark Knight" (two examples just from last year) are among the top 5 movies of the year, they've just changed the rules to placate more casual movie fans and try to grab a bigger audience for the Oscar telecast. By making this change, the Academy is basically admitting they could never accept that terrific animated movies and big-budget blockbusters belonged among the year's best under the old system.

Besides, this doesn’t get to the heart of the problem. The same old stuffy, out-of-touch Academy Awards voters are going to be voting on who actually wins, so it’s not likely any of the new, more-popular choices actually have a chance in hell of winning. In short, if someone says "it’s an honor just to be nominated", they damn well better mean it.

A smaller, more-irritating issue is that this makes me a little mad for all the deserving movies in recent years that missed out on this new opportunity for Oscar recognition simply because they had the misfortune of coming out before 2009.

Then again, better late than never.
All things considered, I like the change overall because the Oscars have become hopelessly stale in recent years. It was time for something drastic. Sure, the Oscar telecast could possibly balloon close to five hours, and this whole experiment could turn out to be a total disaster, but at least they’re doing SOMETHING.

When the most recent Oscar nominations came out, my main complaint was that they were depressingly typical. I think this change will mostly accommodate the general movie going public (i.e. people who aren't movie nerds like me) who can tune in and root for nominees that they’ve actually seen. It also has a chance of making the Best Picture race more interesting. "Interesting" is not really a word, I've associated with the Oscars in recent years.