Some changes have been made to the Academy Awards voting and categories, but most notably some explaination and fine tuning of the way Best Film nominations will be handled, as well as how many would be listed.
Deadline Hollywood quotes the press release:
Beverly Hills, CA — The governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences voted on Tuesday (6/14) to add a new twist to the 2011 Best Picture competition, and a new element of surprise to its annual nominations announcement. The Board voted to institute a system that will now produce anywhere between five and 10 nominees in the category. That number won’t be announced until the Best Picture nominees themselves are revealed at the January nominations announcement.
During the period studied, the average percentage of first place votes received by the top vote-getting movie was 20.5. After much analysis by Academy officials, it was determined that 5% of first place votes should be the minimum in order to receive a nomination, resulting in a slate of anywhere from five to 10 movies.
It is interesting to see how that top 10 is selected and that they are not just throwing in the runners up to see who fills out the 10.
It makes it more realistic that they would only include the Films that have had voters list it as their number one choice. They can all agree that a film is good, but if it doesn’t rank at least 5% of the Academy voting members Top Choice, then it certainly doesn’t deserve to be nominated.
If that means that there are only 7 instead of 10 nominations, so be it. I don’t need fluff titles on that list – it detracts from the suspense when you already know 4 of the titles are not even contenders.
On the other hand, it does honour those films that did recieve recognition from the Academy voters but might have fallen just outside of the 4-5 film limit for the ceremony.
The Dark Knight Snub is oft speculated as being the reason they expanded the nominations list. It might have been up there among member voters, just not in the top 4, but perception is everything and it looked like no one voted for it at all.
This tweak may give more credibility to the expanded Best Film noms.
The Dark Knight was universally praised for its great story , characters, music score, cinematography and direction (by Chris Nolan no less). To this day, I’m sure everyone is puzzled about why the Academy snubbed it in favor of art house films that nobody likes anyway.
The Oscars are decided upon via nominations and votes from its membership. CLEARLY someone likes these “art house films” and as good as Dark Knight was, it was obviously not as well liked as Slumdog Millionaire, Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon, or Milk.
Thats a steep call to say those films are “art house films nobody cares about”. You might not care for them, but that doesn’t mean nobody does.