Is it time for the Oscars go back to having only five nominees for Best Picture? There are rumors The Academy is seriously considering doing just that, in the wake of the lowest TV audience in six years. Back in 2010 the list of nominees for the top prize was expanded to 10, something that hadn’t been done since the 1940s. And it stayed that way for 2011. Then in 2012, The Academy decided to add even more suspense to Oscar nomination morning by announcing there’d be a range of Best Picture candidates, from 5-10, depending on how many films qualified with a certain percentage of the vote. That year, and the next two, there were nine contenders. This year there were only eight (I, along with many others, were surprised that “Foxcatcher”, which got Director, Actor, Supporting Actor and Original Screenplay nods failed to become the “obligatory” ninth Best Pic. nominee).
A return by The Academy to traditional policy will cause nightmares for studios pushing their films in an already crowded Awards Season. Each year seems to bring more contenders than the year before, so the list of Best Picture snubs will simply grow and grow.
And here’s a related question that’s bothered me ever since the 2013 Oscars: Since Ben Affleck shockingly failed to receive a Best Director nod for “Argo”, was that film one of the top five (of nine) to qualify in the Best Picture category? If the Academy’s policy wasn’t to allow up to 10 films to be nominated in ’13, then “Argo” may not have even been in the running to take home the top prize. Of course, that answer will never be revealed, though I’d love to know the rankings of the nominated films each year with initial and final voting.
10 nominees could be too many, but five may just be too few. And I really don’t see how fewer Best Picture candidates will bring in more viewers. I think the current system, for the most part, is working. There are plenty of reasons why the ratings for this year’s Oscars telecast were down and having eight titles on the Best Picture list isn’t one of them. And chances are either “Selma” or “American Sniper” (or both) would have been left-out had there been only five nominees this year, creating more negative backlash for the Academy which absolutely would have resulted in an even smaller TV audience.