They finally listened! Or, rather...
We are now allowing ourselves to freely fantasize that our annual griping here at TFE for the past forever years that Makeup and Hair deserves as many nominations as any other filmmaking craft, planted the seeds that eventually led to discussions on the other coast. The Academy announced that there will be five nominees going forward in the category starting this next season. (We've already adjusted this year's April Foolish Prediction Chart). Should we go power-mad, loyal readers??
Alas, nope. The other rule change we've requested for a long time, didn't happen...
We've always maintained that movies should have to be theatrically released in more than just Los Angeles (the top 5 or 6 markets in the US seems fair to us) to better involve actual paying audiences and end the cheating-in-spirit practice of "qualifying" releases). Sadly, this did not come to fruition...
The Academy were actually discussing qualifying releases but only in terms of Netflix's interruptive power. But that one week in Los Angeles only was a terrible system to begin with, long before Netflix even existed, because it encourages these absurd practices where a movie can end up Oscar nominated before any paying audiences have had the opportunity to see it. Many Oscar fans used to be on our side about this rule but the weird genuflecting to a corporation a lot of people happen to ike (Netflix) has caused the issue to be reframed and now armchair and professional Oscar-pundits seem to love the pre-existing qualifying release rule. Le sigh.
The other rule changes of note this year: Best Foreign Language Film will now be called Best International Film. Here's a very important note: That title change does not change any of the important rules that we're familiar with in this category. The submission process is still the same (one film per country) and the movies still have to have to be predominantly in a non-English language to qualify. In other words the UK and Ireland and Australia, for example, are not going to suddenly have an advantage because they're working primarily in the same language spoken by Oscar. Those countries will still going only be able to choose between a tiny portion of the films that are made there, the ones in a non-English tongue. In addition to the title change, there will now be 10 finalists instead of 9 before the nominations are named (the general Academy will choose 7 of them and the Executive Committee the other 3). 10 finalists still doesn't make much sense for symmetry's sake (Best Documentary Feature has always had 15, so why shouldn't International Film?) but it's better than 9!
Two very minor rule adjustments involving Animated Films also happened. Animated shorts (as well as live-action shorts) were previously eligible for nominations if they won an Academy approved prize at an Oscar qualifying film festival but now they can become eligible the same way features can with a one week theatrical release in Los Angeles (hmmm, would people buy movie tickets to see one short? or will we see more short filmmakers banding together to release "packages" of shorts into theaters to qualify?). As for Animated Features there no longer needs to be 8 films released in a film year to trigger the category (this was kind of silly to "change" since there are always more than 8 now and there are usually far more than 16 which was the number required to activate a full 5-wide category... though the new rules make no mention of a certain number of films to require 5 nominees so perhaps that rule was also voted out though it is not mentioned in the Academy's press release. (We haven't had a Best Animated Feature contest with less than 5 nominees since 2010.)
Are you happy with the rule changes?