Just days after announcing that it’s doubling the number of Best Picture nominees from five to 10, the Academy has made a few other (not quite as earth-shattering) tweaks to the Oscar season. For starters, AMPAS says it will present its honorary Oscars at a separate ceremony in November instead of at the usual telecast. Secondly, it revised the rules in the Best Song category, which now state that if no eligible contender receives a high enough score from the music branch in a given year, there will be no nominees at all. In some cases there may be as few as two nominees in a year.
The more I’ve been thinking about the 10 Best Picture nominees idea, the less I like it. It seems like one of those “participation trophies” you used to get at Little League. But I’m on board with these other changes. Cutting the honorary Oscars actually gives the telecast producers a shot at clocking in under three hours, and removing mediocrity from the Best Song race could certainly spare us some deadly musical numbers.
Comments (1-17) of 17 Add your comment
They should cut the show down to two or two and a half hours… no one is watching it anymore, and trust me… adding 5 more best picture nominees to the the mix and shortening the whole best song category being televised isn’t going to do it…
Lol, what they’re essentially saying is they don’t want to scare viewers away with some old guy give another long speech.
Jeez, could they possibly dumb this thing down any further?
And while there will certainly be 10 worthwhile nominees in any given year, you know this is really just a thin excuse to nominate more dumb popcorn movies instead.
Dave, I would totally agree with you on the rule change for the songs, if we were guaranteed that the songs that wouldn’t make the cut actually represented “mediocrity.” I am afraid, however, that the music branch is so crammed full of staid old fogies that what will actually happen is the retention of the crappy mass-market dross, and fewer nominees like “Once”. I also have to disagree with you on the Best Picture change. I think the new rule connects the Academy to its past in a very resonant way, and will allow for more suprises on Oscar night. I think it’s a great change.
I’m with “Mark.” Further limiting music nominees — in what is far and away one of the most interesting categories, and already one of the least-nominated (only 3 songs nominated last year as opposed to 10 pic noms next year) is guaranteed to backfire. Why is it music is the only category where the academy wants to withhold as much appreciation of the year’s work as possible? Why is it the music wing is so much cockier about its own taste being the sole judge of what artworks are praiseworthy? Last year in the rush to reward as LITTLE excellence as humanly possible, they ignored very good music (the theme from Clint Eastwood’s film; a terrific piece of knowingly campy songwriting from Jason Segal that would have seriously livened up the ceremony and shown a level of insight into what makes good writing that goes well beyond the Academy’s conventional, pedestrian notions of “quality.” I realize this example, “Dracula’s Lament,” is precisely the sort of thing many will be relieved to keep out, because it doesn’t “feel” award-worthy — it’s funny and intentionally odd. But that’s why it’s also the best example of why more is merrier: can anyone truly say the ceremony would have been more boring had it been included? And that’s a sort of WORST-case scenario!) Look, there’s nothing bad or tasteless about allowing the five BEST songs or scores of the year to be acknowleged as such, whether or not the five songs are quite as brilliant as last year’s, or the year’s before. This logic is fine with the directors’ wing, fine with the costumers, even fine with the sound effects people! Why snobberize music out of the movies? Why believe musicians, swing less opportunity for honor, will be more motivated to work hard for honors they are less and less and less and less likely to see go to even the best of each season’s field? Enough already. Limiting to three songs is more than enough.
I actually like the honorary awards. It’s great to share the history of film with my kids. Peter O’Toole has only received an honorary award. If that hadn’t made the telecast he’d be even more shafted that he has been.
I never understood why the Oscars are do flippin’ long. How hard is to show a clip from each category and then hand out an award. But then we would miss out on all the self-congratulatory smugness and FASHION!!
No televised honorary awards? Now I’m mad…
I think there should be a Best Comedy catagory before we go back to doubling up the Best Picture noms.
The Oscars are essentially dead as a celebration of the movies, which is what they used to be when I was a kid. Why bother to even give a best picture award if there are ten nominees? And why are songs so mediocre that they can’t even find five nominees anymore? Do any hour show, give out only the big awards and let everybody go home.
10 is too many, maybe 6 or 7. Why can’t they use the song rule, and just nominate movies that deserve it regardless of the number? There are never 10 movies in a year that deserve to be nominated.
Ten movies in one year is a bad idea, as they will discover in the long run. Take an average year and you’re hard-pressed to find FIVE movies deserving of the nomination.
I think that instead of re-hashing Best Song, they should introduce a Best Soundtrack category (separate from Best Score), which a musical like Enchanted could win (thus killing the split-vote phenomenon), but which could also be won by a movie like Adventureland (the best movie of the year so far), which deserves to be acknowledged somehow for using hits of the 80’s to perfectly and beautifully capture the mood of the movie.
I think that instead of re-hashing the Best Song category, they should introduce a Best Soundtrack category (separate from Best Score), which could be won by a musical like Enchanted (thus getting rid of the split-vote phenomenon) but also by a movie like Adventureland (the best movie of the year so far), which deserves to be acknowledged somehow for using hits of the 80s to perfectly and beautifully capture the mood of the film.
I think removing the honorary oscar from the telecast is a stupid move. It’s the only real and meaningful glimpse into Oscar history that we get. They should instead eliminate the thematic homages that they always cram into the telecast, like celebrating comedy in film or stuff like that. Leave that to the AFI to do. But bring back the honorary Oscar–I want to see when Lauren Bacall finally gets her statue!
That’s a real bummer. I’m a young career artist who actually cares about the contributions of those who came before, and I love hearing the speeches of old masters. You can usually bet it’s going to be an interesting speech on its own merits, too: past honorary winners include Peter O’Toole, Kirk Douglas, Sidney Lumet, Akira Kurosawa, Alec Guinness, Paul Newman, Fred Astaire, Carey Grant, Chuck Jones, and Ennio Morricone – I just freaked out being able to hear a speech from him, with Clint Eastwood translating no less! That was great! I’d love to find archived footage of Kurosawa’s speech, if it exists. Then there are the honorary awards for things like technical contributions, like for Bausch & Lomb and Kodak for lens development, etc. So help me, I think that’s really interesting stuff.
It’s also just a nice way to in a sense say, “hey, we made a mistake by never giving you a win”.
So the people getting honorary awards who made the film industry what it is the first place won’t get any TV time? Great job Academy!
there’s plenty of films made with excellent music and soundtracks, but the academy always nominates the most lame music choices. maybe if they didn’t nominate the most mediocre music from film, the category would be more interesting during the broadcast!!