More Best Picture nominees for the Oscars
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced today that the Best Picture category will be expanded to include not five, not seven, not 8 ½ (Fellini joke!!), but ten nominees. This change will commence at the upcoming Academy Awards, taking place on March 7, 2010, the 82nd presentation of the Awards.
Academy president Sid Ganis explained, “After more than six decades, the Academy is returning to some of its earlier roots, when a wider field competed for the top award of the year. The final outcome, of course, will be the same – one Best Picture winner – but the race to the finish line will feature 10, not just five, great movies from 2009…having 10 Best Picture nominees is going to allow Academy voters to recognize and include some of the fantastic movies that often show up in the other Oscar categories, but have been squeezed out of the race for the top prize.”
The Academy has not always stuck to just five nominees; in its earliest years, Best Picture fields varied by the year, sometimes including up to twelve nominees. The 16th Academy Awards, held in 1943, marked the last year that the nominee pool was so large, with ten nominees.
By expanding the nominee pool in this manner, ten lucky films will now have the chance to stamp an unholy amount of promotional materials with “BEST PICTURE NOMINEE” come February. I am certainly looking forward to the inevitable re-release of sure-to-be-cinematic-masterpiece ALIENS IN THE ATTIC, accompanied by billboards touting its Best Picture Nominee-hood (if Ashley Tisdale can’t make a movie Best Picture-worthy, I don’t know who can). However, this does also mean that (surely?) the Best Picture Oscar race will also include worthy films that would have gone previously un-nominated – the Great DARK KNIGHT Debacle of 2008 stands comes to mind.
The 82nd Academy Awards nominations will be announced on Tuesday, February 2.
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