- Get The Big Picture

The solution to fix the Academy Awards? Expand the field of Best Picture nominees to ten. Sid Gannis, the president of the MPAA, said earlier today, "After more than six decades, the Academy is returning to some of its earlier roots, when a wider field competed for the top award of the year.” He added, “The final outcome, of course, will be the same — one Best Picture winner – but the race to the finish line will feature 10, not just five, great movies from 2009.”

The only problem with that is finding ten movies worth the fuss. Most years, there aren't that many. You can believe Gannis or you can look at last year's omission of The Dark Knight and the constant letdown of not seeing a Pixar movie in the field and come to the conclusion that this is studio pressure.

There's big money in marketing something as a Best Picture nominee, and even though there are bound to be lots of good movies at the end of 2009, will we really have ten legitimate Best Picture nominees? I loved Frost/Nixon, but most people didn't think it belonged there. Nobody bought The Reader beating out The Dark Knight, although that's not exactly the way it works.

It's not bocce, where one movie replaces another. But even if Dark Knight and Wall-E were in the running, people still would've thought The Reader didn't belong in there, so expanding the field won't end that argument. If anything, it will keep the argument going.

So who gets the extra slots? You would think this could open the door for smaller films, but I believe the opposite will be true. Because it will cost even more money to market now, because the category has twice as many openings, independent movies or films from boutique studios might have a harder time standing out amidst the onslaught of multi-million dollar ad campaigns.

Personally, I don't like it. This sounds like a way to placate the studios and not the moviegoers.