Oscar Nominations Shake Up
Posted on June 17th, 2011 by Lee Jarvis in Industry News
This week saw a bit of a shake up regarding the nominations for Best Picture at the Academy Awards. The Academy changed the rules so that anything between five and ten movies will be nominated each year. The default used to be five for 70 years or more, until 2009 when they upped the total to ten. The awards for the 2011 year will see the new new rules come into effect.
The last couple of years there has been the train of thought that some of the nominees were there to simply fill out the spaces, and so this new rule change dismisses the need to do so (if that were to be true, naturally). Having said that, I found that 2010 was a solid year for movies, and that all ten nominees fully deserved a nod. (Of the ten ‘Best Picture’ nominees, six were in our own ‘Best of 2010‘ round up.)
Retiring Academy Executive Director Bruce Davis said, “In studying the data, what stood out was that Academy members had regularly shown a strong admiration for more than five movies. A Best Picture nomination should be an indication of extraordinary merit. If there are only eight pictures that truly earn that honor in a given year, we shouldn’t feel an obligation to round out the number.”
It seems that they have good intentions on making this category an accurate and true representation of the year in film, and that only the best deserve the right to the claim. Several blogs have already cried out that the new rules won’t work, with The Atlantic calling the changes a flat out ‘mistake‘, and will make the awards ‘less inclusive’. It will certainly be interesting to see the nominees being announced, and stoke even more deliberating and guesstimating as to who will be nominated next year. If you feel the need to be that organized, then get your diary ready: The 84th Academy Awards nominations will be announced live on Tuesday, January 24, 2012, and will be presented on Sunday, February 26, 2012.
We’ll leave you with this snippet of the 2010 Best Picture winner, The King’s Speech.
by Lee Jarvis.
Tags: Academy Awards, Ben Davis, Best Picture, Oscars, The King's Speech
