Bringing Up Oscar

By Jeff Mason

Later this week, the nominations for the 81st Annual Academy Awards will be announced. It should be a great week of speculation for awards and entertainment writers, serving up who they think will be chosen and who will be snubbed, opening up a debate about what exactly film excellence is and who is responsible for it. That sure would be nice, but that isn’t going to happen, at least not while being interesting.

Let me save you the trouble of waiting a week and tell you the nominees for Best Picture right now: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Dark Knight, Frost/Nixon, Milk and Slumdog Millionaire. In addition, this list is the same group that will be nominated for best director. And finally, as most everyone following the awards circuit knows, Slumdog Millionaire and director Danny Boyle are the heavy favorites to win the awards come Oscar night, so lets just go ahead and say they’ve won right now.

There you go, the race is over and most of the movies that will be nominated haven’t even been in wide release yet. Even most of the writing and acting awards already have their strong frontrunners, such as the supporting actor category where the bigger question is who will accept the award on Heath Ledger’s behalf.

While I’ll certainly be checking who made the list on Thursday, it probably won’t bring any surprises, so why not make things interesting by doing something the Academy hasn’t done since “Casablanca” won the Oscar in 1944: have 10 movies nominated for Best Picture.

Sure, it won’t necessarily be as prestigious, but it will make for a better discussion and allow many movies that wouldn’t otherwise be recognized get in. It would let comedies and action movies, which usually get slighted in favor of dramatic ones, jump into the discussion and at least be recognized.

Animated films could vie for the highest award in the land instead of being tossed in a category that nominates nearly half of the movies that qualify in it. Possibly the most important thing an expanded Best Picture category would do is open up the discussion to the usually neglected independent movies.

Just imagine if the Best Picture category included The Wrestler, Tropic Thunder, WALL-E, Rachel Getting Married and Burn After Reading. Sure, none of these movies would stand a chance to win the award, but it would make the nominations more interesting and give each one of these movies more exposure, which is especially important for the independent films.

It wouldn’t change a whole lot in the end and would probably tick off some people in the Academy, but why not do it for the sake of mixing things up?