It seems to me like Wesley could not have picked a better time to start this new blog than right now, the week that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announces the biggest change to the Oscar set up since at least 2002, if not before. 2002 was the year that the Academy moved the Oscars from their comfortable home in late March to late February, changing the landscape and business of Oscar campaigning drastically. Suddenly, with ballots due in mid-January, voters had a smaller crunch of time to watch possible films between their Christmas release date and their ballot due date.

The first year to be affected by the date change was the 2003 ceremony, where year-long frontrunner Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King swept the board. There was talk at the time that this date change would drastically change the nature of the nominations list. We were going to see mediocre films sneak in merely based on buzz, as there was no way that all voters would see everything. If the advance word on a film was great, they would vote for it. This had happened in the previous year with Gangs of New York, a film I liked but most people didn’t, which had been a front-runner for so long that it coasted to a nomination in mid-February. People were claiming that people voted for it merely because they had heard it was going to be good, not whether or not it was any good.

In fact, 2003 saw the opposite of what was supposed to happen. Cold Mountain was supposed to be the front-runner all year, with advance word claiming it the film to beat. When it opened in late December, the reviews were warm to unenthusiastic. With the shortened amount of time to see the film, though, we all assumed that it would still sneak into the Best Picture list because people were being told it would be. It got surprisingly left off of the list. Obviously, people had time to see the film and decided it wasn’t Best Picture worthy.

Now, with the 2009 ceremony, we are seeing our next big change with the addition of five slots to the Best Picture list. Again, everyone seems to be asking themselves how this will affect the list of nominees. I like to call this The Dark Knight Rule, as it obviously is in response to that critically acclaimed box office smash not making the cut this year. The Academy wants to get more box office successes to get into the race, and this is their answer to the ratings dip they have been faced with. If there are more nominees, there will be some successful films like The Dark Knight or Wall-E in the list, which will make people watch the awards show (especially now that they have gotten rid of the “boring” honorary awards, but that is for another post). Will this really work, though?

What the Academy has done here is merely expanded the number of films they can nominate, not change the way they are nominated. Are we really to believe that by expanding the number of possibilities that they are changing the tastes of the Academy, or what they believe is Best Picture worthy? The Academy’s taste is fairly firmly set; there is a certain type of film that gets nominated for the Best Picture award. Occasionally this film happens to be successful at the box office, but that happens less and less these days. The Titanics and Sixth Senses of the world will get nominated no matter what, and no matter how many slots there are, if the highest grossing films of the year continue to be Spiderman 3 and Transformers they are not getting nominated. Instead, the Academy is going to be faced with twice as much of the same, a longer list of the types of films the Academy has always nominated. Maybe instead of continuing to change the rules to try to affect the nominations, they should turn to Hollywood and look at the types of films they are making. If they went back to making quality films with prestige that can do well at the box office (like they did up until the 1980s), then the Academy would go back to nominating them.