I suppose it is only appropriate to begin my first official blog post by writing about the Academy of Arts of Science, who controls the biggest award show of the year, The Oscars: the best award show of the year. The Academy announced a few weeks ago that they would be changing the number of best picture nominees from five to 10. This news was greatly overshadowed by Michael Jackson's death, as was basically every other piece of news in those few days.
This is a very significant change. Doubling the number of nominees seems like a response from the Academy whose critics said that they were not including movies that deserved recognition, like The Dark Knight, which was critically acclaimed and had a huge budget, but was not greatly recognized by Oscar. This does open up the opportunity for more movies to be nominated, like blockbusters, animated and foreign films.
I think that this waters down the prestige of getting nominated for an Oscar, which really is an honor. The actual Oscar show is meant to make money, of course, and this could also be a marketing plan to get more people to watch the Oscars. If popular movies are nominated then surely more people will invest time to watch the three-hour long show.
However, just because movies have big budgets or do well at the box office does not justify this prestigious nomination. The Oscars are the ultimate celebration of the art of film and that should not be lost. It is also interesting that no other category was expanded, just the best picture category. In the Oscars first few years of existence, Oscar did nominate anywhere from eight to 12 films, so this change is historically accurate, which adds another layer of complexity to the date.
Time will only tell how this change will impact the award show and future Oscar shows to come.
No comments:
Post a Comment