I never thought I'd be caught dead using the words "bold" and "innovative" in the same sentence with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, but that's what any Oscar fan would have to call the academy's eye-popping decision to expand its best picture nominee list from five to 10 pictures.
All I can say is "Bravo!" If nothing else, the ingenious idea should instantly broaden the appeal of the Oscar telecast -- which has seen a big chunk of its audience disappear in recent years -- by allowing a host of popular commercial films to compete with the vanishing array of specialty division and indie productions that have traditionally ruled the roost at Oscar time.
Yet, for traditionalists, the move also provides a link to the bygone years of Oscardom, as it was actually commonplace in the 1930s and early 1940s to give out 10 best picture nominees. Is inflation a bad thing? It certainly wasn't in banner years like 1939 and 1941, when you could argue that any one of the 10 nominees -- classic films all -- would've been an outstanding choice.
So why did the academy, which has generally been loath to make any radical change, take such decisive action? I'd love to think that the academy elite were responding to critics like myself, who've been saying for years that the Oscars, as I once put it, "are a cobwebby relic from a bygone media age when Big Events earned Big Audiences." But I don't flatter myself. Though its members include the best and brightest of Hollywood insiders, the academy is the world's most insular institution. When it makes changes, the momentum comes from the inside, not from pesky outsiders.
That's what was so laughable about the reaction from certain realms, where some were suggesting that the change came because of pressure from the major studios. I had a chat with the chief of one of those studios yesterday. He offered a different point of view, saying that the academy was so resistant to outside pressure that "I probably have a better chance of getting Barack Obama to listen to my special pleadings than I would with the academy. They've always kept us at arm's length."
'Wall-E' missed out
That's not to say that the studios won't benefit in some ways from having a larger field of nominees. I asked several Oscar experts the following question: If the field had been expanded last year, what five movies would've made the cut, in addition to the five official 2009 nominees? They all agreed that the top three beneficiaries would've been "Wall-E," "The Dark Knight" and "Doubt," spreading the rest of their votes among such candidates as "Iron Man," "Gran Torino," "Revolutionary Road" and "Changeling."
