The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences a.k.a. the Oscar Award folks, shocked the Hollywood community yesterday by announcing that the 82nd Academy Awards® for the 2009 season will feature 10 best picture nominees.
This move, while obviously made to generate more interest in the awards (ratings have been dropping like a stone in recent years), actually goes back to the earlier roots of the award presentation.
According to the Academy announcement, “For more than a decade during the Academy’s earlier years, the Best Picture category welcomed more than five films; for nine years there were 10 nominees. The 16th Academy Awards (1943) was the last year to include a field of that size; Casablanca was named Best Picture. (In 1931/32, there were eight nominees and in 1934 and 1935 there were 12 nominees.)”
My gut reaction as a film writer who loves movies but isn’t thrilled generally with the overall current crop, is that they might need a lot of filler to stretch the nominations to 10. On the other side of that argument, it should bode well for smaller scale movies that have lately earned their recognition with the Spirit Awards for independent films. My guess is that the Academy is hoping some more popular movies, including comedies, might earn some of these slots. I have no problem with a brilliant comedy being nominated, but as much as I laughed at The Hangover, I wouldn’t want to see that as an Oscar nominee.Publicists who work at the major studios are not thrilled by this announcement. Every year these PR flacks have to spend money on Oscar ads for films they know don’t have a chance to make their actor and director clients happy.
According to an article in Reuters, one top executive said, “Were we behind this move by the Academy? No way. We’re going to have to spend more money in marketing campaigns for one or more unlikely winner, and mostly there’s very little financial upside even when we do win. All of this takes enormous time and energy, and now it’s extra time and energy.”

Tags: Academy Awards, Oscars

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 25th, 2009 at 11:44 am and is filed under Awards, Film. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.