And then there were 10...

You may or may not have heard, dear readers, that the AMPAS made a shocking announcement yesterday afternoon. I was going to blog about it then, but I was too taken aback to be able to form coherent sentences. Sid Ganis and crew made the announcement yesterday that starting in with the 2010 Academy Awards, there will be 10 Best Picture nominees. Yes, 10 nominees. There are currently, as faithful readers of ...this is home... are well aware, 5. I'm quite sure how I feel about this. One the one hand, back when the Oscars were first handed out, there were 10 nominees. On the other hand, there is the potential to lessen the prestige of a Best Picture nomination/win. On the other hand, it will give more genre-specific films (i.e. The Dark Kinght, Wall-E) a chance to compete for the big prize because, let's face it, there is a great cache that comes with being able to call a film "Academy Award-winning Best Picture". On the other hand, will there is the possibility that there could be a struggle to find 10 "worthy" nominees. There seem to be an equal number of pro's and con's.

I'm going to guess (and many bloggers/writers agree) that this is to try and appease the masses after the tremendous heat the AMPAS took in February for failing to nominate 2 of the most successful (critically, financially and publicly) films of 2008, the aforementioned The Dark Knight and Wall-E. There are a lot of other groups that have 10 nominees in their "Best of" year end list; National Board of Review, AFI, even the Golden Globes have 10 Best Picture nominees split into drama/comedy-musical category. This will hopefully give comedies more of a chance, as they're usually seen by the Academy as too slight, when in reality there usually is one or two each year that is quite good. Were there 10 worthy films last year? Course there were, my Best Picture nominees would have been

Slumdog Millionaire
Wall-E
Waltz with Bashir
The Dark Knight
In Bruges
The Wrestler
Milk
Revolutionary Road
Forgetting Sarah Marshall
Gomorrah

It's interesting that the other categories will still have 5 nominees, so the Best Director category is where the Academy will let you in on what film/who they're patricuarly enthusastic of in any given year. There are some folks out there in cyber-space that think this will be a one year test, but I don't think that it will. It will be interesting to see what they come up with for their 10.

Should we start a write-in campaign for The Hangover now?