CHESSNOID

You know I love to watch movies.  Every year, my wife and I make an attempt to watch all the Academy Award nominated movies.   This year they have 10 best pictures nominees:

Best motion picture of the year
* Avatar
* The Blind Side
* District 9
* An Education
* The Hurt Locker
* Inglourious Basterds
* Precious
* A Serious Man
* Up
* Up In the Air

We have watched 7 of the 10 movies so far.  We should be able to get the last 3 in by the end of the week.  I am not sure why they decided to have 10 pictures instead of the normal 5, but honestly some of the movies nominated are not Oscar worthy.  When I watched a couple of movies knowing they were nominated, I was surprised because they were not good.  There were some good elements in the movie, but the movie itself was poorly executed or the plot was lacking.  My movie blog has more details of the movies I am talking about.

First Showing. Net:

“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,” said Ganis. “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.” It’s now being called 10 in 2010. Some are claiming that this decision was made under pressure from the studios, as it allows them to feature more great movies and include more advertising at the Oscars. Others are saying this will now water down the Oscars, since a nomination “used to be” a prestigious recognition.

I’d argue that this just makes things so much more interesting. One of the biggest complaints of last year was that The Dark Knight didn’t get nominated. If only it had been one year later, it would’ve gotten that nomination. It also just makes the final outcome so much more of a mystery. I’ve felt like that out of the five nominees in the past few years, we can usually spot the winners. This time there will be so much of a bigger selection to choose from, that it could be even more thrilling to see who the Academy eventually picks. Whatever the case, this is exciting news, and should make for a very interesting Oscar race next year.

I do believe the real reason for the bump to 10 movies is all about the money.  Surely, these are not the 10 best movies made last year.  Most of the movies are not “great” and some are not even “good”.   Yes, everyone is entitled to their opinions, but I think the academy needs to start watching more movies.  That can be the only explanation why these movies were nominated.

As far as the academy voting for the winners,  I think they should be forced to watch all the movies they actually vote on.  For best film, it would make sense for every one of them to watch all 10 movies before voting, but I doubt that happens.  So people vote for maybe 1 of the 3 or 4 movies they have watched.