Oscars: Can't pick the right five, so they hedge their bets with TEN Best Picture Noms!

An ill-conceived group of mediocre choices for last year's Best Picture Noms at the Oscars left out audience favourites and awards night ratings grabbers The Dark Knight, Wall*E and The Wrestler from having a chance at the coveted statue but from now on the Academy won't be so trusting to it's voters to get it right. Which of course they so often don't. According to a press release from President Sid Ganis which I saw at Variety, next year will see TEN BEST PICTURE NOMINATIONS voted, so instead of them actually picking the correct five, they will now be able to hedge their bets and pick ten, hoping that the extra choices will mean a box office smash and ratings winner will worm it's way in there. In truth though it means they now have twice as much scope to show how incompetent they are. This whole new direction completely devalues the whole meaning of the Oscars, and now the slogan "Nominated for Best Picture" will be twice as easy to get attached to your movie, and now worth half as much prestige. The reason the "Best Picture" tag has worked so well for all these years is that it influences the average everyday movie goer to the notion that the film they are about to see is one of a very few, select group of movies to win that honour that year. It works so well because the number is so small. Doubling it, halves it's meaning. Why not stop at nominating ten? Why not nominate 100 movies per year? This was the wrong way to do it and belittles the current Academy voters and the whole nominations process that has been in place for so long. What would have made more sense would have been to mix up the Academy voters with some new members, encourage them to actually think outside of the box and stop voting for fare which fits the criteria of their own politics or what they want their view of American cinema to be, and make sure Academy voters actually broaden the scope of the films they see. Movies like The Reader and Slumdog Millionaire are so predictably Oscar material, they are overlooking some real American greats year in, year out. You know the one way I think this could have worked is if they had allowed TEN nominations but each year the extra five were mostly made up by foreign picture fare, with serious credence given to animated and Indie films too. Great foreign picture movies like Let the Right One In, The Baader Meinhof Complex and Waltz with Bashir wouldn't look out of place with the American five nominated last year. Better yet, scrap the Best Foreign Picture and Animated Film category all together, treat every movie as ONE and let all movies have a fairer playing field.