Best Picture Decision: Which Combination is Right?
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Five. Ten. Sliding Scale. These are the terms folks in Awards blogosphere use to describe the Academy’s choices for Best Picture. The Academy recently had a meeting to decide upon what they want to go with and whatever they pick is sure to cause much discussion. I’ve been thinking about the concept of Best Picture a lot since the Academy expanded the field then went to this bs sliding scale. Particularly since I’ve been writing and making top 10s, I found it incredulous that the Academy expanded the field to 10 nominees and only kept it for two years. In particular, I’ve been ruminating on something Sasha Stone of Awards Daily said on Twitter with regards to the Best Picture lineup. Here’s the convo
Sasha can certainly be a rabble rouser (one of her best and worst qualities) but I think she’s on to an interesting thread that I’d like to explore more. Let’s take a look at the years since the expansion with movies directed by women:
2009: The Hurt Locker, An Education
2010: The Kids Are All Right, Winter’s Bone
2012: Zero Dark Thirty
2014: Selma
That’s 6 in five years compared to 6 in the previous 82 years. Oof. On this alone, one could see the benefits of moving to the standard 10 with 10 slots on the ballot voting. Now what if we decided to look at the movies with storylines about women or with a strong female character at the top.
2009: An Education, Precious, The Blind Side, Inglorious Basterds (this is a stretch but Laurent’s character is important)
2010: The Kids Are All Right, Winter’s Bone, Black Swan, True Grit (stretch)
2011: The Help
2012: Zero Dark Thirty, Amour, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Les Miserables and Silver Linings Playbook (both stretches)
2013: Philomena, American Hustle (stretch)
2014: The Theory of Everything (stretch)
That’s 17 films (including the stretches) out of a total of 55 films (30%) compared to 7 out of 25 for 28% in the five years preceeding. This might not seem like a big deal, as the percentage fluctaes, but look at the movies above more closely. Nine of those titles are from modern day and 11 of the 17 of them are from the 70s till today. Compare that to 7 post-70s films from 2000-2008 and 7 post-70s films from 1986-2000. This might seem slight, but what these trends show is a willingness for the Academy to break from their shackles about their definitions with regards to Best Picture regarding women (particularly modern stories) and films directed by women.
More than just women though, the Academy in recent years has proven far more willing to go out on a limb with regards to the best picture lineup. While yes, the Oscars have nominated a variety of films in the past (2007 is amazing), have any of these lineups really not being full of prestige fare? And by prestige I mean movies folks would have predicted from day 1. Since 1990, I can count eight films that don’t fit that mold. 8 out of 90 movies for a paltry 9%. Now you can debate that the Academy always has their movies and rarely strays but the imagination they’ve shown since expansion is worth commending for example there have been:
– Five scifi films nominated for Best Picture since 2009 (it can be argued it was nearly 6 with Star Trek) compared to 6 before then (and none between 1995-2008). The first was nominated in 1971 (!) No genre has been helped out more by expansion than science fiction.
– Two animated films made the lineup (Toy Story 3 and Up) compared to one (Beauty and the Beast) in the 81 years prior.
– Seven films and one Best Picture winner about racial minorities in five years (compared to 7 in the previous 10 years and zero winners)
-Four LGBTQ films have been nominated.
I could continue to throw stat upon stat at you to say why the expansion has been beneficial to the Oscars and the industry at large, but the proof is in the pudding. You don’t get films like Her, District 9, Selma or The Wolf of Wall Street in years of five and are those lineups really worse because films like The Blind Side, A Serious Man, or Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close get in? I mean this is the same Academy who put The Reader, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Finding Neverland, Chocolat, etc in lineups where there were only 5 spots. And to everyone who brings up the arguement that “oh well only 2-3 of the x number of nominees was in contention anyways” should we just cut it down to 2-3 since numbers 4 and 5 wouldn’t win? At least with the 10 guaranteed noms with 10 spots on the ballot, voters were able to show us that they have expanded horizons that reflect what the film year actually meant.
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