Hold your (dark) horses, this is not an advanced rating for the Oscars. The awards hoopla is not until eons away. The race, however, has just been made bigger. The Academy Of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences has unveiled that the traditional Big Five Best Picture nominees will be upped to a hefty ten. Isn't the usual show excruciatingly long enough already? We need some more pillows, people! So, by next year, we can expect counting down like we all do with Ten Little Indians, but with those shiny, naked, bald-headed golden statuettes for bashing.
But ten - really? This is something that Marilyn Monroe would've called a "doozy".
First off, this is not the first time the Academy had bolstered the race. Back in 1943, sixteen pictures vied for the golden guy, to which Casablanca triumphed. But since then, the template of five reigned rigorously. Meanwhile, to rehash a rather controversial Oscar race last year, it seems that the shutting out of The Dark Knight and Wall-E out of the nomination circle made the Academy a hotspot for criticisms. Let's face it, those snubs were appalling and these two great films were arguably better than, say, the so-obvious Oscar-friendly The Reader or Milk. As commercial as they were, they were films that truly married popular culture with art and still remained highly reputable. Now the batmans and robots have stirred shit up, orchestrating revenge and ganging up on these bunch of jokers (no pun intended) who make the decision. After all, isn't the Academy comprised of old grumpy men in exec suits, judging films through a haze of cigarette smoke and a stupor of Jack Daniels? Talk about being out-of-touch.
This voting expansion may seem, at first, a bold move - but to scrutinise it closely, it's the Academy actually getting week-kneed in having their reputation damaged. Not only do they give out statues to questionable pictures (Forrest Gump over The Shawshank Redemption, and Crash over Brokeback Mountain - two biggest Best Picture upsets in history), but they also shut out foreign films of astonishing calibre with the likes of The Lives of Others, Pan's Labyrinth and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days out of any categories other than the stock Foreign Film segment, movies that belong to a greater breed than many of those fish-faced Oscar baits.
As it stands presently, the race is still a thing to watch. Dark horses will gallop into the competition, as this year is filled with many promising work (Cameron is back with Avatar, after he proclaimed himself as 'king of the world' with his sinking-ship movie and disappeared for approximately twelve years; Pixar's Up has just wowed Cannes; Jackson's recreating heaven with The Lovely Bones; Scorcese's loony bin thriller Shutter Island, no explanations needed; and it's auteur-feast with Tarantino, Almodovar, Von Trier, Campion and Haneke, all back with apiece each). For all this ballyhoo, I'll bet my money on this: Michael Bay won't get anywhere near to even one of those golden guys.
