The news came in this week that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, better known as “The Academy,” are considering a change to the annual Oscars telecast. According to Hollywood Reporter, they are seriously thinking about going back to only five Best Picture nominees each year, after previously expanding the category to 10 nominees in 2009, and then to “between 5 and 10 nominees” starting in 2011.
The reason the rules changed in the first place was supposedly to allow for more popular, mainstream films to appear on the ballot, to potentially shake up the Best Picture race, and to increase mainstream audience interest in watching the Oscars. And in the years since the Best Picture category expanded, blockbusters like District 9, Inception and Toy Story 3 were indeed nominated, but none of them won. The majority of the nominees and almost all of the winners were still art house movies that failed to excite general audiences.
So now The Academy is under the impression that the expanded Best Picture category was a failed experiment. And their “solution” is to go back to only five nominees, because obviously, that will fix everything.
Now let me explain why this is really stupid, and how The Academy could actually shake things up with very little hassle.
The Best Picture Winner is Never, Ever a Surprise
You would have to go back decades to find an Oscar winning Best Picture that wasn’t either the obvious frontrunner, or at least the frontrunner’s most obvious competition. Sure, it was a little unexpected that Saving Private Ryan lost the Best Picture award, but it wasn’t a surprise that Shakespeare in Love was the Academy’s pick instead. Everyone knew that it was neck-and-neck.
Take it from those of us who prognosticate the Oscars for a living: it’s almost always a two-horse race. This year it was between Birdman and Boyhood. None of the other six nominees had a chance in hell. Last year it was 12 Years a Slave and Gravity. And when it’s not a two-horse race, it’s no race at all. Nothing was ever going to beat Argo, and nothing was ever going to beat The Artist either.
It doesn’t matter how many nominees there are if only one or two films even realistically have a shot. More nominees doesn’t mean there are more potential winners, it just means there are more guaranteed losers. As long as the Oscars are a hype machine, fueled by a mob mentality that leaves every Academy voter leaning in the same direction, that’s never going to change. If you want to change the Best Picture category, you have to change the Academy.
So How Do You Change The Academy?
That’s an excellent question, and one without a decent answer. Perhaps the first thing to do is narrow down the specific problem. Let’s start with the statistics, which reveal that The Academy is overwhelmingly white (94%), male (74%) and old (the average age is 63).
So don’t think of The Academy as an objective voting body, think of them as a target demographic. That would mean that the target demographic for filmmakers who want to win an Academy Award is old white guys. It doesn’t matter what the other members nominate or even vote for, because the movies that appeal to old white guys are going to win, pretty much every single time. That’s probably why The Dark Knight didn’t get nominated in the first place, and how a film like The King’s Speech was able to beat both The Social Network and Inception for Best Picture of the Year.
A massive influx of new blood into the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences might seem like a good start. Every year The Academy invites new members into its folds, but not enough to significantly alter the demographic makeup of the voters. Inviting a massive number of fresh, young and diverse new members could shake things up, but that’s a very severe course of action. Not a bad course of action, per se, but perhaps adding a few thousand members all at once probably isn’t the route The Academy would want to take.
Maybe the answer is simpler than that. Maybe the answer is to keep the voting process the same, but to decrease the number of voters.
Change The Voters, Every Single Year
The Academy currently has approximately 6,000 members. That’s a pretty big number. So big, in fact, that you could easily trim it down – at least as far as the voting process is concerned – and still have an enormous number of votes to sort through.
So what would happen if, instead of telling every single member of The Academy to vote, they only assigned a certain percentage of them to this task? Every year, only one third of the Academy would nominate and vote for the Oscars, with the voters selected with as much diversity as possible. Every member would be guaranteed a spot on the nominating and voting committee every three years, so no one gets left out altogether, or even for long. There might be some complaints from voters who are committed to voting every single year, but not everyone has time to watch all the nominees already, and a lot of the members of The Academy are too busy making movies to get actively involved in the voting process every time.
Would it change anything? Maybe, maybe not, but it would probably have a more significant impact on the films nominated, and the films that win, than simply reducing the number of Best Picture nominees back down to five. With only two serious contenders in the category each year already, wouldn’t it practically have to?
Because getting rid of a whole bunch of guaranteed Best Picture losers won’t shake up the Oscars. Only shaking up The Academy can shake up the Oscars. If they can’t add enough new members to change the demographic of their voters, then maybe cycling through the voters they already have will do the trick.
Is this a good idea? I don’t know for certain, but at least it’s a new one. And if The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences is ever going to “fix” the Oscars, it’s going to be with a different course of action, not one they already gave up on over half a decade ago.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and the host of The B-Movies Podcast and The Blue Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
