Why 10 is a good number

My first reaction to 10 Best Picture nominees was to my default assumption of greed. If five movies get more money from an Oscar bounce, now there's twice the fun. However, the article about the change in The Wall Street Journal pointed out that last year, with the exception of Slumdog Millionaire, most of the Best Picture nominees didn't make a significant percentage of their domestic gross after they were announced as nominees. The Journal did point out that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences hoped that the change might draw a bigger audience to the awards broadcast. So greed is involved. What a relief.

I didn't think any more about this until we went to see Up. Now I know why 10 Best Picture nominations is not only good from a greed perspective but from an artistic perspective as well. Any plan that might get Pixar a Best Picture nomination--or better yet, a win--is good, right, decent and true.

In 2004, Peter Jackson won an aggregate Oscar ostensibly for The Return of the King that was really for his work on the entire LOTR series. He deserved it. Unfortunately, he won for the weakest of the three films. Of the other four nominated films, Lost In Translation, Master and Commander, Mystic River and Seabiscuit, NONE is a better movie than Finding Nemo. Honestly, if you didn't have The Return of the King in there, a Best Picture win by any of the other four nominees is embarrassing. (Sorry. I'm just not into to Sofia Coppola or Sean Penn. And yes, I have seen all of these movies.)

Since the Academy ghettoized feature-length animation to its own Oscar, they can avoid the hard choice of nominating an animated movie for Best Picture by pointing to an apples-to-apples comparison in its own category. This is bullshit. (They did the same thing with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, though it did garner a nomination for Best Picture. I would argue that Gladiator beat it out because people felt okay about not voting for CTHD as Best Picture because they could vote for it as Best Foreign Language Film. I mean, I like Gladiator and all, but please.)

Wall-E would have been up against considerably more formidable competition in 2009, and not having seen most of the nominees I'm not going to dismiss them out of hand. But the Journal points to a legitimate concern: most of the nominees last year were not particularly popular. I think that's why they didn't get much of an Oscar bounce in their receipts. Let's face it: a movie about Harvey Milk has a limited audience in the U.S. Which is not say that the movie shouldn't have been nominated. So too for Frost/Nixon.

My point is that expanding the nomination pool will not help those movies that moviegoers aren't interested in anyway. It can, however, open the field to deserving, popular movies that might not otherwise get recognition. (Because we all want our favorites to win, yes?)

In a year that will probably not generate a strong crop of Best Picture nominees for 2010 (have you seen anything you think qualifies?), Up will have a hard time cracking a pool of five nominees, simply because it is going to win Best Animated Feature. That's a shame, because Wall-E and Up both demonstrate that Pixar is marrying the very best expressions of the visual with some of the most subtle writing and storytelling you can see in a theater. And the best thing is that they are getting better and better at it. (With the exception of Cars, and I think that's on John Lasseter for making first and foremost a movie that he wanted to make for himself. It's good, but it is obviously a different experience from the work that Andrew Stanton, Brad Bird and now Peter Docter are doing.)

So if having 10 nominees dilutes the pool, so be it. And if it dilutes the pool so much as to open the door to a win for Up or its ilk, so much the better.