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Monday
21Sep2009

Producers Guild Ups Best Picture Nominees to Ten

DateMonday, September 21, 2009 at 4:06PM
I suppose we should have seen this coming, and maybe it adds uniformity to the end-of-the-year awards race: The Producers Guild of America has doubled its list of the year's best movies to ten nominees, echoing the move made by AMPAS to turn the Oscars into a less competitive field of "best" pictures.

The problem with it specifically is that you make the award less exclusive, and if you're not expanding every category to ten possible winners, you're only diluting the biggest award in the industry. That seems antithetical to picking the top of the heap. But we know why the Oscars did it (ratings, revenue), and the PGA pretty much had no choice but to follow suit.

So far, the other guilds have kept their lists to five films, but that stands to reason since the Academy didn't expand the fields for Best Director, Screenplay, or the acting categories.

PGA President Marshall Herskovitz said that the Academy decision was part of the motivation to go from five to ten movies, "but...we feel it better represents the unprecedented diversity of films being produced today."

While there is greater diversity among films, it would still be nice to see a documentary or a foreign language film get serious attention for the main prize of the year when that makes sense. We still only have eight foreign language films even nominated for Best Picture after all these years, and the last one to do it without any concrete connection to Hollywood was Life is Beautiful. So it's one thing to say you're recognizing diversity and quite another to actually do it.

As to my earlier point about uniformity, it's true that critics lists generally reflect top ten lists and the National Board of Review does it, too. The Golden Globes kind of does that, as well, although it splits them into categories. But yes, you can make the claim that ten is a round number and all that, but is it a better number?

My fear is that with more nominees we'll actually see less diversity among them, because of the amount of money required to really get a movie in that race. With more nominees, there's a better chance you can get "Now nominated for Best Picture of the Year" in your TV commercials, but only if you outspend the other guys. And since this move by the Academy back in June can be viewed as at least an indirect reaction to The Dark Knight and Wall-E not receiving nominations for Best Picture, you have to ask yourself how much more diversity to the nominee pool this will add in the long run.

AuthorColin Boyd | | in | Print ArticlePrint Article | | Comment5 Comments |

Reader Comments (5)

This is so ridiculous I mean screw this idea, their changing a format that has been around for what 60 + years, I dunno.....

Just because they fucked up last year, which they DEFINITLY DID!!!

But these guys are whomever did that should be fired and not change the whole SYSTEM THAT HAS WORKED ALL THOSE YEARS!

Monday, September 21, 2009 | Unregistered CommenterSEAN

For what it's worth they already nominate 10 screenplays a year, they just divide them into two categories.

Monday, September 21, 2009 | Unregistered CommenterD

Yes, that's true. I was unclear on my meaning. It's a different logic for those ten scripts, although I vacillate on whether or not they even need to go original/adapted, because much with the ten Best Picture nominees, you tend to have a watered down pool of nominees. Two years ago, The Savages and Lars and the Real Girl were both up for Original Screenplay, and I'm not sure that represents the strength of the argument for splitting original and adapted scripts.

Monday, September 21, 2009 | Registered CommenterColin Boyd

I actually agree that there is not a really great argument in favor of having two screenplay categories not only does it lead to undeserving movies being nominated it makes no sense why they don't also split the Best Director and Best Picture awards.

Monday, September 21, 2009 | Unregistered CommenterD

Right. It's the Golden Globes Syndrome. Too many undeserving nominees defeat the purpose of awarding the best of the year.

Monday, September 21, 2009 | Registered CommenterColin Boyd

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