Two performances seem to be untouched so far with Oscar followers that I think need to be considered as serious contenders for a nomination. Both come from long-time Hollywood performers who have yet to make it to the Oscars.
Sandra Bullock in The Blind Side. After a much stronger than expected opening this weekend, Bullock has started to garner attention as a possible dark horse nomination. She had her biggest opening weekend ever, topping her earlier this year appearance in The Proposal. For the past decade, she has been probably the only actress in Hollywood who has been a consistent box office magnet. She is much beloved in Hollywood, a likeable personality who hasn’t had many chances to show her chops (except perhaps in Best Picture winner Crash). Futhermore, the Best Actress category is overly populated with young breakthrough actresses bursting onto the scene and older, respected actresses. Bullock is the only hot young star in the picture, and with the box office to back her up, this may finally be her chance.

Stanley Tucci in The Lovely Bones. As the reviews start coming in on the disappointing side for Jackson’s film, Tucci’s chances may be drifting away as Bullock’s are solidifying. His is a real juicy role in an awaited, major December release. His murderous neighbor seems similar to roles that have finally gotten actors like Jackie Earle Haley to the auditorium in the last few years, and is the kind of character role the Academy is drawn to. Add in that he has been around forever but has not had a real solid chance until this year. Add in that, like Bullock, he also had a box office success this summer (Julie and Julia, which could also garner him a nomination in The Lovely Bones falls apart) and that he has probably worked with 75% of the Academy at some point, and I think he is the darkhorse Supporting Actor nominee everyone is forgetting about. Slight problem: if Mark Wahlberg is being pushed in the Supporting category also, he could be overshadowed by his own cinematic adversary.

A lot of ink, both on this blog and elsewhere, has been spilled already about the major upheaval of the Best Picture category, but little attention has been paid to the other major change the Academy made last week to their nominating procedure. Starting this year, in the Best Song category, there may be 2, 3, 4 or 5 nominees, or no nominees at all.

The Best Song category has always had a weird voting system where voters watch a DVD of all the songs in the context of their films, and then rank them 1 through 10. The cutoff is now set at 8.25 (which I believe it was in the past), and if no film gets that high of a score there will be no nominees. If there are nominees, they will only be songs that got that high score.

In a year where the Academy is making drastic changes to presumably raise ratings, getting away with the number of production numbers may be harmful to that goal. It seems to me that to a majority of casual viewers, the songs may be a highlight of the show (and can attract some big-name stars to perform). The reason given by the Academy is that the quality of nominees has been low, and this will help raise the bar for nominees. Unfortunately, this may not solve the problem.

Last year saw only 3 nominees, as compared to the usual 5 nominees. Those 3 were two songs from Slumdog Millionaire (“Jai Ho” and “O Sava”) and “Down to Earth” from Wall-E. All the nominees were fine, but none were fantastic songs and looking back on it I don’t think I could hum any of the songs four months later (and Wall-E was my favorite film of the year). With this new voting procedure, either all three would have been nominated, two of them would have been or there would have been no award given. No other song would have had a chance to get in.

This would be a good rule change if we were merely minimizing the damage, but it doesn’t do anything to improve the category. There are many great songs still written for films every year (in fact, the last few years have seen a lot of strong candidates the Academy has completely overlooked), and all the Academy is doing is making it harder for them to get nominated. Last year, there was much attention to Bruce Springsteen’s “The Wrestler,” a popular song by a great rock musician in an Oscar-nominated film that couldn’t get a nomination. These rule changes wouldn’t have helped it a bit. Neither would it have helped two of my other favorite songs of last year, “Rock Me Sexy Jesus” from Hamlet 2 (although humorous songs have never done well in this category) and the glorious “Little Person” from Synechdoche, New York. Neither would it have helped the music of Dan in Real Life or Adrienne Shelley’s “Baby Don’t You Cry” from Waitress the year before, both of which were some of the best use of music in a film in the past few years.

Like the attempt to clean up the Best Documentary category a few years ago, the Academy is solving its problems in the wrong way (although the quality of that category has gone up). This year, I expect 2 or 3 mediocre songs to get nominated, better than 5 mediocre ones, but I would rather have 3 mediocre songs and the chance of one great song to sneak in instead.

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.