10 Best Picture Nominees ??????

Today, The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced that the Best Picture category will expand from five nominations to ten.

Seriously.

I was pretty taken aback when I heard this news. It's not earth-shattering news but in my world it is noteworthy, to say the least.

And I don't think it is a good idea. One, it waters down the recognition of being a Best Picture nominee. Ten is a lot of movies. There should be some honor in just being a nominee for Best Picture. Now I think that distinction doesn't mean as much as it used too. Getting to that number ten might prove to be problematic in years where it will be hard pressed to argue that there are ten films worthy of being Best Picture. Just look at this year's nominees...I would argue that three of them (Frost/Nixon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and The Reader) shouldn't have been nominated in the first place.

Second, it's just a cheap attempt to increase ratings...and maybe buzz regarding the ceremony. There's no question that the snubs of The Dark Knight and of WALL-E hurt the telecast in that it didn't draw in those casual viewers. Instead of reviewing and tinkering with the complicated film nomination process they have decided to take the easy way out and to expand the category to include, for example, those movies that were commercial successes. Granted this also opens the door for indie films and foreign films to get nominated as well but those kind of nominations aren't going to increase the hype like say a Dark Knight would have last February.

Instead of trying to deal with the biases (of a lot of academy members) against genre films and comedies the Academy thinks quantity is going to be more important than quality. I really think this is just an over reaction of the Academy blowing it by not nominating The Dark Knight for Best Picture.

Normally with five nominations in the Best Picture category one can ascertain that it's going to come down to two...maybe three movies that could actually win. That just being nominated is award for the other two or three films. Now we are going to have ten movies in the running. Does anybody think that with ten movies that there's a possibility that any of those ten films could actually win? And is it possible that the vote will be so splintered that a film that gains BS momentum (like last year's The Reader) could end up winning Best Picture. I don't mean to sound old and crotchety but I just don't like it. I also don't like their reasoning that just because they did it in the '30's and '40's that it means that it's a good idea. That doesn't make a lot sense to me.