After watering down the Oscars in quest for TV audiences, the motion picture academy reversed some of the damage done two years ago when it expanded the Best Picture category to 10 movies. Yesterday, it set the nominees for Best Picture category to anywhere from 5-10 films, depending on clearing a benchmark in secret votes.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) feels this will goose up excitement when nominations are announced in late January, since movie fans won’t know how many films will get Best Picture nods.
That variable count is seems good. Some years, there are more than five films worthy of Best Picture, and yet the nominations were fixed at five for decades until 2008. In my view, the decision for 10 films for 2009-2010 was too many. The most marginal films weren’t worthy.
AMPAS pockets about $70 million from ABC Television for Oscar telecast rights, which provides the academy with the bulk of its income. So propping up the TV viewership of the Oscars telecast is a big concern.
In the new setup, a minimum of five films are selected. Up to five more are added if they get 5% of the “first place” votes from academy voters; typically the top film averages 20.5% of the votes, so 79.5% if up for grabs. Academy members get five votes each for the first round of balloting to select nominees, and under the rules the first-place picks are crucial. Previously, voters selected 10 films for Best Picture in the first round.
“If this system had been in effect from 2001 to 2008 (before the expansion to a slate of 10), there would have been years that yielded 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 nominees,” AMPTAS says. In the second round of voting (when academy voters select from nominees for the winner), the complex “preferential” system remains in place.
Animation, special effects and documentary categories also gets some rules changes.
“Marketing to Moviegoers: Second Edition” estimates that, in a normal year, six to eight films had a realistic chance of being nominated. And of those, only three films have a realistic shot at winning…not the others.
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