News
Expect Oscar Surprises From Wide Field, Vote Change
By Robert Marich
Jan. 3, 2012-The New York Times is predicting an unpredictable Oscar awards season because of new rules giving more weight to first-place votes, which allows a small but intense following to propel a movie, as well as a good field with no obvious frontrunners.
“But the unexpected gift from the year’s bumper crop of good movies — The Help, Margin Call, Shame, Beginners, to name a few (with short titles) — if not so many great ones, is a return of the unexpected,” says the NY Times article by Michael Cieply.
“The potential for surprise is especially high in the best picture category,” says the article. “There, a change in the counting mechanism by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which awards the Oscars, has sharply diminished the impact of second-place, third-place and other votes down the ballot, while allowing a film with as few as 250 first-place votes, in a group with almost 6,000 members, to capture a nomination. So a very small, but committed, minority can add a picture to a roster of nominees that will range between 5 and 10, depending on how many hit a threshold set at 5 percent of the vote.”
Films like The King’s Speech and Slumdog Millionaire swept to victory with an air of invincibility in recent years, so unpredictability would be a change.
Another unfolding story for the Oscars how it has become an “indie festival” favoring arty and esoteric films and shunning glossy major studio movies of accomplishment. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences recently opened the Best Picture nomination field to a variable group of 5-10, after previously being capped at five, to get more films in the Oscar conversation.
This came after The Dark Knight—a major studio film that wowed critics—did not even get a nomination. In decades past, Oscar voters did support major studio films as evidenced the original Star Wars from 1977 was nominated for Best Picture—probably because it electrified fantasy adventure genre and did huge box office—even though it was never going to win.
These days, Oscar voters seem to delight snubbing box office blockbusters. It’s believed the academy is worried the cavalcade of indie films might eventually reduce Oscar telecast TV ratings, which is a concern because the roughly $65 million license fee that it gets from ABC Television for Oscar telecast is dependent on high ratings.
For full text, click links below; this website’s text is searchable via searchabox at center left of homepage: