First off, I don’t necessarily think expanding the best-picture category to 10 nominees is a bad idea. In fact, I think it might have been a risk worth taking, considering the pressures on the Academy to deliver better ratings and somehow invigorate the Oscars.
But it is a risk – and since it was announced a few months ago, some questions about the whole thing (and its next step, extending preferential voting to the final ballot) have been rattling around in my head.
So here they are: five questions that I think really ought to be asked about the new best-picture process.
1) Will voters use all ten slots on their ballots?
About 6,000 Academy members will nominate for best picture. They’ll get ballots with 10 blank lines (not five, as in the AMPAS photo at right), and they’ll be asked to name ten candidates, in order of preference.
Will they really fill in all those lines?
I’ve had Academy members tell me that even before the change, they rarely filled out all five slots on their ballots. They’d pick their three favorite films, contemplate those two empty lines, and decide that there really weren’t any more movies that deserved their vote.
Faced with twice as many blank lines, does it make sense that these voters will change their habits? Or will PricewaterhouseCoopers be counting a bunch of half-filled best-picture ballots?
This is a year in which we clearly aren’t going to have 10 slam-dunk, unassailable best-pic contenders, a year in which a few of the nominees will no doubt be derided as undeserving of a nomination. (And yeah, the same thing happens with five nominees. But it’ll happen more with 10.) I have to think that a good number of voters are going to get to the fifth or sixth line on the ballot and decide that they just can’t bring themselves to write down anything else.
Now, there’s no way to predict how many voters will submit incomplete ballots – and no way to tell after the fact, because the accountants certainly won’t tell (unless the Academy asks, in which case they’ll tell them, but not us).
And it wouldn’t be fair to assume that incomplete ballots would somehow invalidate or alter the process.
But still … it makes me wonder.
2) Will we ever see a year in which the films are good enough, and varied enough, to give the Academy the kind of best-picture slate they really want?
Face it: what the Academy wants out of the expanded category is a ballot that includes critical favorites (say, “No Country for Old Men” and “Slumdog Millionaire”), boxoffice champions (“The Dark Knight,” “The Return of the King”), animated films (“Beauty and the Beast,” “Toy Story”), foreign gems (“Pan’s Labyrinth,” “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”), documentaries (“An Inconvenient Truth,” “The March of the Penguins”), and wonderful little movies (“Juno,” “Little Miss Sunshine”).
They want all of that, or something close to it, in one year.
