Back from a fantasy, yes...
By now you have read the rumor that the Academy is considering going back to only five Best Picture nominees per year. I've been amused by the headlines about this as they're extremely telling before you even get to the editorials. Consider Awards Daily's jaded / defeated "As They've Always Wanted" (Sasha likes the expanded field) or In Contention's even angrier / more insulting "Wants to Go Backward" (Gregory also likes the expanded field). Oscar bloggers have, for the most part, enjoyed the expansion because it gave us more to write about.
I never personally liked it. Oh sure it was fun the first couple of years in the way sudden upheavals in any tradition can feel thrilling in either an adventure film or horror film way. It also prompted fun guessing games about what might have been nominated in years past. But as a lover of Oscar history who enjoys comparing all eras too each other in out-of-time conversation, it was ultra-disruptive. How to compare years with 5 versus years with 8 versus 9 versus 10? Pick a number and stick with it. I understand that people have enjoyed the diversity of genres that the expanded field brought us but that only worked the first two years. [Lots more...]
After that the publicists / studios acclimated to the new system and went back to putting their efforts and money into pushing the films they thought of as "Oscar Bait." And now the field of 10, or 9 or 8 looks pretty much exactly like the fields of 5 from days of yore.
2011 gets my vote for most difficult year to figure what it would have been like under old system
• 2009 Avatar, The Hurt Locker, Inglorious Basterds, Precious, Up in the Air (if only five)
plus: A Serious Man, An Education, District 9, The Blind Side, Up
• 2010 Black Swan, The Fighter, Inception, The King's Speech, The Social Network (if only five?)
plus: 127 Hours, The Kids Are All Right, Toy Story 3, True Grit, Winter's Bone
• 2011 The Artist, The Descendants, The Help, Hugo, Midnight in Paris (if only five? really tough year to call)
plus: Extremely Loud, The Tree of Life, Moneyball, War Horse
• 2012 Argo, Les Miz, Life of Pi, Lincoln, Silver Linings Playbook (if only five? another tough year to say)
plus: Amour, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Django Unchained, Zero Dark Thirty
• 2013 American Hustle, 12 Years a Slave, Dallas Buyers Club, Gravity, Wolf of Wall Street (if only 5? but maybe not. Capt Phillips had DGA and Philomena & Nebraska acting support)
plus: Captain Phillips, Philomena, Her, Nebraska
• 2014 American Sniper, Birdman, Boyhood, Grand Budapest Hotel, The Imitation Game (if only 5? but Whiplash might have surprised knocking one of these out)
plus: Selma, Theory of Everything, Whiplash
It's a very tough perception problem that I'm not sure anyone fully knows how to address, least of all Oscar bloggers who consistently if perhaps unintentionally reinforce 'looks good on paper' notions all year long which only adds to the problem. I'm not blameless either though I try to use my own wishful thinking to promote open minded reception of films that don't seem typical but are nonetheless deserving of awards attention. Like Pride, The Babadook, Captain America Winter Soldier or Under the Skin this past year to name a few examples.
I understand the passion behind the "this is terrible" arguments but frankly some of the assumptions are unsupported by Oscar history. Gregory contends that this will only further acerbate their diversity problem but that's not true. The only field that is expanded is Best Picture. The acting races have remained the same and there were years as far back as the 70s and 80s with far more diversity than we saw this past year, ethnically speaking. I buy Mark Harris's argument a few years back that statistically the wider Best Picture field has actually resulted in LESS films receiving nominations overall. Now, if you're not fighting for a Best Picture slot you're just basically not in the race. Less screeners seem to be being watched.
I dont know what the solution is but one thing that definitely needs to be addressed is how few pictures the voting members are actually seeing. It's alarming time and again at awards-courting events to speak to members who haven't seen buzzy films. Some people in the past have wondered why select critics haven't been invited to join the Academy (there are critics within the Tony voting ranks for example) but I'd argue that's not a good solution either since critics have shown in their annual awards that they don't have much more imagination than Oscar voters in terms of what is "Oscar Worthy".
What's more we've already seen the damage in stability that can be done when they race for correctives. If the expansion changed because of The Dark Knight (2008 - I'm far more upset about WALL•E missing that year) why change the whole system again just because Selma had some campaign problems in December/January. Shouldn't an 87 year old institution be less excitable when things go wrong in one particular season?
Perhaps it's time for a smaller faction -- I know this sounds counterintuitive -- within AMPAS to serve as a nominating committee much the way same way the Executive Committee of the Foreign Language Film category has vastly improved that field each year with "saves" of high quality films that didnt' receive enough votes in the first round. Or even just an Executive Committee who could do press releases and email blasts and coordinated events quarterly -- anything to expand the "what you should watch" and get members watching contenders all year round.
And before anyone says it, hear this: I don't buy the argument that Academy members don't have time to watch their screeners because they're working. If people -- and Academy voters are just people like you and I with busy lives and jobs -- have time to binge watch 13 hours of their favorite Netflix series they have time to watch a 2 hour more here and there. If you watch movies all year round, even as few as one a week, the screener holiday crunch wouldn't be so overwhelming. Chances are you'd already have key favorites that you planned on voting for before the publicists even got to you.
Better viewing habits may be the only way to expand the aesthetic palette and increase diversity of genre and actors considered each year.