The move to 10 best picture nominees just might work.
And “Avatar” just might lose.
With a week to go before Oscar nominations and six weeks to go before the Oscar show, with the Golden Globes and the Critics Choice Awards and SAG and the Producers Guild behind us, it’s time to take stock in the Academy Awards race, to look at what we’ve learned and how it’ll affect things in eight days, and in a month and a half.
And I’m starting to wonder about a couple of things. Yes, “Avatar” is the best-picture frontrunner. But I can easily see a scenario in which it will lose the Best Picture Oscar, probably to “The Hurt Locker,” just as it did Sunday night at the Producers Guild Awards.
Yes, the move to double the best picture nominees has been widely derided, and 2009 has been mocked as entirely the wrong year to try the experiment. But I think it might do exactly what the Academy wanted it to do: provide a more varied, more commercial successful group of nominees, and boost the ratings of the Oscar show.
1. The Ten
If you look at the Producers Guild, which handed out its awards Sunday night, the 10 best picture nominees ran a real gamut: “Avatar” and “Star Trek” and “District 9,” “An Education” and “The Hurt Locker” and “Precious,” “Up” and “Inglourious Basterds,” “Up in the Air” and “Invictus.” Sci-fi, blockbusters, animated film, little indies, critical favorites and the biggest boxoffice movie in a decade.
While it doesn’t include a documentary or a foreign film, this is the kind of variety the academy was looking for when it moved to 10 nominees. The big fear – that doubling the number of nominees would lead to double the number of small, angry indie movies – will certainly not be realized.
And it’ll definitely lead to increased ratings – although the catch is that is you look at years like 1998 (“Titanic”) and 2004 (“The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King”), one blockbuster best-pic competitor is all it takes to bump up the ratings. Which means that all by itself, “Avatar” would likely have led to the same kind of ratings increase.
Aye, there’s the rub: if the move to 10 results in a livelier race and a boost in ratings, it’ll have far less to do with what the Academy did than with what James Cameron did.
2. The Nominations
As for what Cameron will be competing with on Oscar night, the top half of the picture is clear. All signs say that “Avatar,” “The Hurt Locker,” “Up in the Air,” “Inglourious Basterds” and “Precious” are locks for nomination.
Beyond those five, you need to think about how the Oscar nominating ballot, with its 10 blank lines for ranked choices, works. When I used the preferential tallying system to count a batch of critics ballots last week, two-thirds of the “voters” wound up casting their crucial votes for their number one selection; votes in the other slots occasionally counted (in fact, movies listed in the number six, seven, eight and nine spots came into play about 10 percent of the time), but the key to winning a nomination is to have a passionate group of fans who’ll put you in the number one spot on their ballots, augmented by support all down other ballots.
