Like a certain disgraced former mayor who starts selling his belongings on eBay so that his picture will keep appearing in the paper, the Academy Of Motion Picture Arts And Sciences cannot imagine a world in which it’s not being breathlessly talked about.
So, in addition to the inevitable mea culpa from Neil Patrick Harris – the latest in a long line of high-profile hosts to fail to wrestle the entertainment world’s slowest train wreck into shape – the Academy is doing a little soul-searching. It turns out that the answer to Fixing The Oscars is amazingly simple: if this was the lowest-rated broadcast in six years, just undo what you did six years ago!
Hence, the announcement earlier this week that next year’s Oscars may roll the number of possible best picture slots back down to five.
I mean, maybe? Sure, the Academy’s 2009 decision to double the number of potential best picture nominations from five to a possible 10 was perceived as an attempt to open the playing field up to films that might otherwise be elbowed out – genre works like District 9, animated features like Up and Toy Story 3, comedies like A Serious Man, well-regarded indies like Winter’s Bone and The Kids Are All Right. Not that any of them ever won, of course it was just an extra pat on the head.
Okay, maybe you could argue that year’s winner, The Hurt Locker, needed the wider playing field to register – though with nine nominations in total, six of which it actually took home, it would likely have made the final five regardless.
And you could argue that expanding the field to 10 nominees was in fact a return to Academy tradition from 1934 to 1943, that’s how many films were routinely nominated for best picture.
But there’s no point making those arguments now. AMPAS has made its announcement, and we must all pretend that dropping the number of best picture nominees back down to five will fix everything that’s wrong with the Oscars. All it will really achieve, of course, is a reduction in the number of awkwardly matched montage sequences … unless the producers decide to return to the tradition of having separate montages for each nominated film, which seems more likely.
Honestly, though? The Oscars, either as an arbiter of artistic worth or an evening’s entertainment, are impervious to change. They’ve defeated hosts as charismatic and dynamic as Harris and Hugh Jackman, steamrolled over restrictions of good taste and reasonable running times, and simply refused to evolve with the times. This is a show that recruits someone as weird and unpredictable as Lady Gaga … and has her sing a Sound Of Music medley in a ball gown.
Every year, the event’s producers promise to learn from their mistakes, and every year they make the exact same ones, falling back on nostalgia and sentimentality while trying to be hip and glamourous. Only George Clooney – and maybe Matthew McConaughey – can be edgy in a tuxedo. Everybody else looks uncomfortable.
And that, in the end, is how the world views the Academy Awards – an anonymous, sparkly mass that stiffly parades its past glories before us while occasionally giving out a prize to the right picture. (Do not get me started on the Birdman thing.) Things like Scott Feinberg’s excoriating Brutally Honest Oscar Ballot series – where anonymous voters proudly declare how clueless they are about more or less every category – don’t help, either.
But hey, if we’re all debating the merits of fewer best picture nominees, the Academy doesn’t have to worry about any of those bigger, thornier issues. Let’s worry about them next year after all, they’re not going anywhere.
