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Spoilers, upsets could rock the Oscars
(Guest post by James Frazier)
If you’re anything like me, you take the Oscars seriously more out of the need to have a movie-themed holiday than a respect for the Academy’s membership.
But when it was announced that 2010’s ceremony would feature ten Best Picture nominees instead of the traditional five, seemingly all of cinema fandom scratched their collective heads in surprise. Not since 1943 had there been ten nominees, and not one televised ceremony had more than five.
Why mess with tradition, and what effects would this have on the results?
Good questions, the first one being easy to answer. After years of mediocre show hosts and slates of nominees that few outside of Hollywood care about, something is being done to reverse the diminishing returns. While an increasingly youthful Academy membership (Michael Cera is a member, for what that tells you) has ushered in an era of nominations for more subversive and offbeat films such as “Litte Miss Sunshine,” “Juno,” and “Milk,” this has seemingly been at the expense of the more populist tastes of award shows past.
Last year’s snub of “The Dark Knight” for a Best Picture nomination might have been the final straw as an endless stream of complaints and near record-low ratings did nothing to squelch long-running concerns that Oscar’s relevance was going the way of the black-and-white film.
With ten Best Picture nominees, the fuse has been lit for what the Academy clearly hopes will be a return to ratings form. Although the nominees will not be announced until February 2, the doubling of the field will result in a wider array of films that will certainly increase the lineup’s mainstream appeal from the previous few years.
Box office hits such as James Cameron’s “Avatar” and Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds” will most likely compete alongside more obscure fare such as “An Education” or the critical darling “The Hurt Locker.”
Also changed is the method by which the winner is determined. Instead of a straight vote, members are to rank their ten favorite films by preference. The ballots will then be separated into ten piles based on which film received the number one spot on that form.
If one film receives 50% or more of the number one votes, it’s declared the winner, but if not, the smallest pile of ballots will be reorganized into the remaining nine based on their second place selections.
If a film still doesn’t have 50% or more of the votes, then the process is repeated with the next smallest pile, and this process is repeated until the 50% number is achieved, at which point the Best Picture winner is revealed.
Thus, the rather political Oscar campaigning process, which sees studios shell out millions to hustle nominations for their films, might have just became a bit more complicated. Due to the system’s importance on eliminating films with lower vote totals, it’s conceivable that the film the most first place votes could succumb to a picture with far more second and third place spots.
The wider range of films could be a spoiler. While a film like “Inglourious Basterds” might ordinarily fail to even become nominated for Best Picture, with a wider range of competition and a voting system that emphasizes ranking selections by preference, it could suddenly become a serious contender.
Films like “Basterds” or “Up” that standout for one reason or another could potentially garner a large number of two and three place votes, whereas other potential nominees such as “The Messenger” or “Invictus” could suffer for their lack of flashiness. A successful ad campaign for Best Picture will likely encourage voters to place the film in their top three.
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