So having spent most of last week in Sonoma for a vacation that quickly turned from a real one to a “partial” one (after I was asked to go on eastern time zone conference calls, which made for very long days and called for lots more beverage imbibing later on in the day), I’m still catching up on my arts and culture news from last week. Of course the big news in the American film world is the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ announcement that next year’s Oscars will have ten (yes, as in diez, dix, dieci, zehn) Best Picture nominees instead of five. OK, so there is precedent for this, the Oscars were nominating ten films for Best Picture from roughly around it’s inception to 1943 (when Casablanca won over The Ox-Bow Incident, Song of Bernadette, Watch on the Rhine, and For Whom the Bell Tolls, among others). But that was the golden age of Hollywood film-making. Seriously, would the Academy have been able to get 10 films nominated for Best Picture during the past several years? There is serious barrel-bottom-scraping that comes to mind with the nominees in this decade for example (Chocolat in 2000? Seabiscuit in 2003? Michael Clayton in 2007? Frost/Nixon this year?) How are they going to fill up those ten slots, when historically they have been unable to pick five really good pictures to nominate? So will The Hangover and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen get a pretty good shot at a Best Picture nomination? The snub for The Dark Knight aside, it almost seems like box-office success is a better predictor of an Oscar Best Picture nomination than artistic criteria. Boy, this disappointing, perplexing news is enough to make this avid Oscar-watcher hang up his binoculars.
Tags: Academy Awards
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