10 Best Picture Nominees... OR LESS
Wednesday, June 15, 2011 at 9:32AM 
Just when we were getting acclimated to the new system of ten best picture nominees, Oscar is changing up their rules again. Deadline reports that after carefully studying their voting data, the Academy's governing board has decided that that Ten Best Picture Nominees thing was perhaps a little too generous. 'Shouldn't there be some threshhold of passion for a film to win that coveted "best picture" title' they asked themselves.
Their answer was "yes".
How much passion will be required exactly? The magic number is 5%. In short, a film will have to win at least 5% of #1 votes in the nomination balloting in order to join the Best Picture Lineup. There'll be no less than 5 Best Picture nominees in any given year and no more than 10. So one could say they're splitting the difference between the old system and the new.
Best Thing About This Change
It'll be quite unpredictable. We won't know until Oscar nomination morning how many "Best Pictures" we're getting. Otherwise I can't see an upside. We'll still get those pictures that we scratch our heads over "how did that get in there?! That doesn't belong!" -- don't think for a moment, for instance, that you can wipe out choices like The Blind Side. After all, we had those kind of decisions in the days of five nominees. Bad taste is indestructable!
The ZZZ Thing About This Change
I suspect other pundits will disagree but I don't see how this change means anything at all in terms of precursor madness. Not all precursor awards -- those would be tastemakers that proceed AMPAS's 'final say' -- are bound and determined to predict the Oscars but they'll stick with 10 nominees anyway as it gives them more wiggle room in the mirroring.
The Worst Thing About This Change
If you value visual and numerical symmetry as I do -- and boy do I -- you'll hate that you won't be able to line up various years in neat chart formats or say things like "2013's lineup is so interesting but nothing beats 2007. No, no, let us not speak of 1999!" There won't be any way to directly compare year-to-year anymore. (How will we even structure our prediction charts?) There's something quite beautiful about tradition in mythic institutions like Oscar. The chronologies will line up nevermore. Won't it also be more of a slap in the face for the snubs? "Sorry there were only 5 nominees this year but the rest of you who were 'in the hunt'. Turns out they only told you they loved you in the heat of the moment. They didn't."
Here's the part I found most intriguing* about the decision...
“In studying the data, what stood out was that Academy members had regularly shown a strong admiration for more than five movies,” said Davis. “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.”
If this system had been in effect from 2001 to 2008 (before the expansion to a slate of 10), there would have been years that yielded 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 nominees.
*And by intriguing I mean CRAZY-MAKING. Does this mean none of those years would have seen 10 nominees? Will ten films be a once a decade thing? [Tangent: This DOES mean that they keep all the voting data. How is it that this never leaks? Price Waterhouse must be guarded by Heimdall or suspended in a heavily guarded plastic prison like Magneto.]
You know what else this means: LISTS, Lots of lists! We'll look at 2001 through 2008 soon but we have to save some chi for a later post, can't blow it all at once on this announcement. For now, let's just discuss this change and wonder which films would've been axed from the top ten by way of not getting enough #1 placements.
Here's my guesswork...
2010 - 8 nominees
I realize I'm stubborn about The Kids Are All Right... I enjoy being stubborn. But there was a time, if we're being honest with yourselves, that people thought it would be one of the five even if there were only five. My guess is that 127 Hours just barely slipped in and that Winter's Bone, despite being very well regarded was lacking in #1 votes. Who knows... But there did seem to be a broad range of support for many features last year so perhaps only The Boy And His Rock would've been eliminated.
2009 - 7 nominees
Though I was personally horrified at The Blind Side's inclusion in 2009 I do not think it was in 10th place. Oscar is so much more mainstream than the media likes to pretend and given the massive embrace of that movie from the general populace, there are few sound reasons to think AMPAS voters weren't also squeezing it, with formulaic tears streaming down their faces. District 9... well, I'm still surprised it got in given Oscar's history of shunning sci-fi. Perhaps most controversially, I'm guessing Pixar would've had to wait until Toy Story 3 to get the "only the second animated picture nominated for Best Picture" honor.
What'cha think of the rule change?
P.S. In other rule changes, the number of Animated Features nominated will be more flexible too. Previously it was 3 or 5. Now it'll be 2 to 5 depending on the number of films released that are eligible and number of votes those films received. The documentary category's eligibility will now be in sync with the calendar year like most categories.
Reader Comments (71)
People should chill with the doomsday predictions. "No more foreign language films in the Best Picture category"? "No more animated films"? I'm not saying they'd have all gotten in, but one has to assume that Life is Beautiful, City of God, Wall-E, Up, and Toy Story 3 would have had somewhere between good to amazing chances with these rules and that's just in the last 13 years. Il Postino was nominated in a year of five. A documentary BP nominee is never going to happen, but it wasn't going to happen anyway so let's calm down.
[/freakout]
evan -- but without "freakouts" what would Oscar fandom be? ;)
Isn't it a way to avoid the "this one wouldn't be here if it wasn't a 10 nominees list" in the future? So that they'll be giving automatic credit to a nomination that otherwise might look too cheap in the near future (if they continue nominating Blind Side-s). Anyway, my first thoughts were: have there been nominees with less than a 5% of support? That is, if the voting members are 6,000 people some BP nominees have been elected with 300 hundred votes? And if everything is so secretive with AMPAS, how will anyone know that a certain movie only got 4,9% of votes while another one got 5,1%? Does AMPAS really expect such a leap of faith? Not from bloggers or average movie fans, but from studios, Weinsteins and the like. Are they indirectly forcing themselves to be more open about the process?
I've been suggesting a system like this since they first changed it to 10 nominees in 2009. I personally couldn't care less about having a round number of nominees. A system like this is the only way to prevent "filler" nominees. Plus I can't wait to see everyone's predictions this year. It will be even more interesting having to predict not only which films will be nominated, but how many.
And just because everyone else seems to be guessing, I'll predict what previous years might have looked like under this system. I'll do a round number, though, and do it for the past 20 (1991-2010) years instead of just the past 11 (2000-2010) like everyone else is doing.
2010: Drop 127 Hours, Winter's Bone, The Kids Are All Right (7 nominees)
2009: Drop The Blind Side, District 9, A Serious Man, An Education (6 nominees)
2008: Add The Dark Knight, WALL-E (7 nominees)...POSSIBLY Doubt (8 nominees)
2007: Add The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (6 nominees)
2006: Add Dreamgirls, Pan's Labyrinth, United 93 (8 nominees)
2005: Add nothing (5 nominees)
2004: Add Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Vera Drake (7 nominees)
2003: Add Cold Mountain, City of God (7 nominees)
2002: Add Talk to Her (6 nominees)
2001: Add Black Hawk Down, Amelie, Mulholland Dr., Memento (9 nominees)
2000: Add Billy Elliot, Almost Famous (7 nominees)
1999: Add Being John Malkovich (6 nominees), MAYBE The Matrix (7 nominees)
1998: Add The Truman Show (6 nominees)
1997: Add The Sweet Hereafter, Boogie Nights (7 nominees)
1996: Add The People vs. Larry Flynt, Sling Blade (7 nominees)
1995: Add Dead Man Walking, Leaving Las Vegas, The Usual Suspects (8 nominees), MAYBE Toy Story (9 nominees)
1994: Add The Lion King, Bullets Over Broadway, Three Colors: Red (8 nominees)
1993: Add Short Cuts, The Age of Innocence, Philadelphia (8 nominees)
1992: Add The Player (6 nominees), MAYBE Husbands and Wives (7 nominees)
1991: Add Thelma & Louise, Boyz N the Hood, Terminator 2 (8 nominees)
Nathaniel- ha, yes you're right. Freakouts are part of Oscar fandom. Sorry I got preachy for a moment there.
Iggy, I wouldn't ever count on AMPAS being transparent. About your other point, "support" is relative. I'm sure that some of the nominees in the past two years weren't the first choice of 5% of voters, but with the reassortment portion of the nomination process, they were probably in the Top 2-4 of more than 5% of the ballots. I can't remember how nominations were done pre-2009 though.
Oh I could play this game for hours! Fun stuff, but yeah, crazy-making. I completely agree about The Blind Side - I know 2003 was bad, people, but it wasn't Seabiscuit bad and that was not excusable. I'm afraid An Education would have hit the skids on these rules though. I'd actually guess seven for each of the two years you mentioned:
2010: The King's Speech, The Social Network, The Fighter, True Grit, Black Swan, Toy Story 3, Inception. Missing out: Winter's Bone (which actually may have had a good few #1s), The Kids Are All Right and 127 Hours. Inception could actually fall out as well. (I immediately wanted to assume AMPAS would nominate Inception, The Dark Knight AND Memento once I saw these rules, but I'm not sure any of them had the support.)
2009: The Hurt Locker, Avatar, Precious, Up in the Air, Inglorious Basterds, The Blind Side, Up. Missing out: An Education, District 9, A Serious Man. This kills me because An Education and A Serious Man made my personal top five, but yeah, I think they'd miss. I could see Up score quite a few #1s, though actually some of those folks might have gone for The Blind Side. Who knows?
Oh, and just to stir the pot: Are there any lone Director nominees (as in, their picture didn't make BP but they got into Director) whose films would still miss with these rules? Would Mulholland Drive make it? How about Red?
eurocheese: Red would definitely have made it in for Best Picture, seeing as how it was also nominated for Original Screenplay and Cinematography. Mulholland Dr. is the one I'm not quite certain about, since Director was its ONLY nomination. I put it down as a guess just because it's the kind of film that would probably attract a lot of #1 votes, even if a lot of other voters wouldn't put it on their ballot at all. But as long as they're just going by #1 votes, then yeah, I think it probably would have gotten in. I could, of course, be wrong.
So to answer your overall question, I do think that it's fairly safe to say that a Best Director nomination would almost always carry over to a Best Picture nomination under this system.
Predicting's gonna be a bitch
John-Paul, yeah it does make you wonder. United 93? Black Hawk Down? Probably yes to both, but... hm.
I'm afraid this year the system will get my hopes up. I was pleasantly surprised in 2007 and disappointed every year since. If nothing else, this will tell us what they really think. (I'm not sure we want to know, lol.)
Eh. I think this desire for symmetry is overblown. Remember, for the first several Academy Awards, there was no set number (5, 10, whatever) of nominees in any of the categories. So basically, arguing for a return to five is a way of saying, "We want it the way it was between 1944 and 2008."
But Nate, I think you're more prepared for this than you realize. Since the number of Best Picture nominees will presumably not be revealed until the nominations themselves are announced—kind of like the Golden Globes a few years back when they preceded the Best Picture-Drama category with the comment, "there are seven nominees"—it won't be enough just to predict the ten possible Best Picture nominees. Because it's a bit of a cheat to make ten predictions when only seven nominees turn out to be chosen—it's like getting three passes. You can't fairly say, "I went 7 for 7 on the Best Picture nominees!" when you made 10 picks.
The only truly accurate way to make predictions now will be to do what you've been doing for years: rank the nominees. (You trailblazer, you!) At the very least, we'll see Oscar predictions look more like this (using the 2010 nominees as an example):
"The top five Best Picture nominees will be The King's Speech, The Social Network, True Grit, Black Swan and The Fighter. If there are 1-5 more nominees they will be, in descending order: Inception, Toy Story 3, The Kids Are All Right, Winter's Bone, 127 Hours."
Are the percieved no 6-10 films of the past 2 years really so low in quality that we're rejoicing that the Oscar lineup will have fewer of them? The Blind Side sure. But aside from that we've gotten great genre films, surprise hits, great independent films, films with stuctures or themes usually ignored by Oscar and films with great roles for women.
The rationalization seems to be the belief that films that we generally like would still make the cut anyway. Really? We say that 2010 wouldn't have been any different without 127 Hours in the mix. What about Inception? Or Toy Story 3? What if those had missed the cut?
Put me down as a defender of the 10. I thought they created a nice summary of what the year in film was like. Even The Blind Side. A bad movie, sure but it represented what a sizable demographic watched and liked that year.
eurocheese: Lone director nominees that probably wouldn't have made it in:
The Sweet Hereafter
The Last Temptation of Christ
Short Cuts
You are soooo right J.P.! Nate IS a trailblazer!
POINT OF ORDER: "Four Weddings and a Funeral" was nominated for Picture and Original Screenplay.
I love this change, and also, the precursor awards suck the life out of awards season. Does anyone else agree with me on that? They're mostly pointless and ring of vanity. I also dislike the way discussion is centered around the significance of the precursor awards.
An excellent change!
2001: 7: Mullholland Drive, Black Hawk Down
2002: 8: Far From Heaven, About Schmidt, Adaptation
2003: 9: Cold Mountain, In America, 21 Grams, City of God
2004: 6: Hotel Rwanda
2005: 10: New World, King Kong, Constant Gardener, History of Violence, Walk the Line
2006: 6: Pan's Labyrinth, Dreamgirls)
(Babel would have been left out having already been nominated in 2003)
2007: 8: Sweeney Todd, Into the Wild, American Gangster
2008: 7 or 8: 5 noms + Wall-E + Dark Knight (with a possible inclusion of Rachel Getting Married), I really think Wall-E and Dark Knight would have gobbled up a lot of the ppl who didn't vote for the top 5. If you wanted to choose a film based on a great acting performance Milk or even the Reader would have locked up that vote
2009: 8 nominees for sure: Up, Education, Blind Side + the main 5
I'm sure Up would have gotten in. The backlash for Wall-E not getting in.
2010: 7: Inception, True Grit, Fighter, Black Swan, King's Speech, Social Network, Toy Story 3
So how many office pools and on-line contests will embrace the new tiebreaker - pick the number of films that will be nominated for Best Picture?
To those thinking that "Winter's Bone" was on the bubble...I think those who supported it really supported it, so I believe it had a better chance of securing one in twenty first place votes than "127 Hours" or some other choices last year.
A question - what are the chances that a film in the six through ten slots in previous years got 5% of the first place votes without getting enough overall placements to make the final five-wide list of nominees? Could we have seen a film like "Doubt" move ahead of "Juno" for that last spot under the 5% requirement?
I hate this another change!
I so love the 10 nominees for best pic, but I think this move makes the whole thing "informal", if that is the right word. I just simply hate it. No more chances for either too small acclaimed films and big commercial movies that are well-received.
This feels very shitty! I'm sorry, bu that's how I feel. Same with the animation category. Good for the documentary rules. The 4 nominees in the best song last year already bothered me a lot. Then this? Are we going a bit too casual with the Academy? Or are we just too desperate to make things so interesting that it's already for the worse?
I hate this move. I wish they would still keep it to 10 nominees for best picture. That's my wish. If they actually continue this, my respect for them will somewhat lessen.
Come on! They are just playing safe, which is so bad. They're afraid that in 5 nominees, they will snub worthy films. In 10 nominees, the not-so-good films that they loved will be there. So, I'd prefer "playing safe" than "saving face" because this lessens the thrill and the formality and the neatness.
I think we should have a campaign to stop this, all of haters of this change. Don't you think?
Just a reminder to people making retro-projections: the press announcement said that there were years between 2001-2008 that would have had five nominees only.
Two thoughts just to throw out there:
1) What if 2009, where the top five were particularly clear, had been a year of only five nominees? Not saying it's so, just wanted others' opinions.
2) I wonder if this will make people incorrectly assume which films are the "Top 5" in the future. If there had been extra quality nominees at the time, I wonder if people would assume that there was no way Chocolat, Seabiscuit, or the like would actually have made the shortlist.
Mr. 9 -- you are correct. i had a brain tumor for breakfast.
everyone -- i'm honestly surprrised that people think MULHOLLAND DRIVE would have made it? In 2001 if there were any films that were shut out that would have made it that would have been BLACK HAWK DOWN and SHREK which were very "hot" at that time, and more widely embraced. Mulholland Dr is brilliant but it was clearly one of those directors corralling move to get Lynch a nomination. I don't believe it would have made the list. maybe this calls for another post.
Nathaniel: It's quite possible that Mulholland Dr. would still have only gotten a Best Director nomination even if this new rule had been in effect. I would guess that it would have at least been nominated under the previous 10-nominee system though. I mean, what were the other contenders that year? Black Hawk Down for sure. Shrek and Amelie would definitely have made it in under the 10-nominee system, but I'm less certain they would have made it under the new "5% rule" (if that's what we'll call it). Then what? Mulholland Drive and Memento were the only other really solid contenders from that year, so they would have rounded out the top 10. Come to think of it, that would have been an incredible set of nominees had there been 10 slots to fill that year.
Also, if there were a year from 2001-2008 that would have only resulted in 5 nominees under this system, my best guess would be 2005. Aside from 2008, it's the only year in which the Best Picture and Best Director nominees lined up 5 for 5, and it's not even like there was another strong contender that seems like it just missed out. Maybe Walk the Line, but I honestly don't think that's the kind of movie that would have earned 5% of voters' #1 choices. So yeah, if only one year from 2001-2008 had only 5 nominees, I can't really see an alternative to 2005.