Like many people, I had an immediate negative reaction to the announcement last week of a new Achievement in Popular Film category for the Oscars. But as I thought about it, I grew to like the change and see it as a worthy and noble effort.
The Academy Awards’ process for choosing its Best Picture nominees isn’t broken, but it could easily be better. A system that has room for Amour alongside Argo and Brooklyn next to Mad Max: Fury Road is doing something right, even when widely acknowledged stinkers also get nominated. But the Academy could enact two reforms – one simple, one more fraught – that would address some shortcomings.
Regardless of which film takes home Best Picture on Sunday night, the Academy Awards finally got it right. I don’t mean that the best movie of 2009 will have won, even if one only considers the 10 nominees. Rather, the Oscars have chosen a sound voting system – an instant-runoff election – that nearly guarantees that every ballot will help determine whether Avatar or The Hurt Locker nabs the prize.
The announcement that the Academy Awards will double the number of Best Picture nominees this year has certainly generated buzz, although it has mostly led to jokes about the length of the awards telecast. (And while we’re at it: What’s the deal with airline peanuts?) The Film Experience’s Nathaniel Rogers summarizes the reactions and remains doubtful that the move will broaden the appeal of the nominees: “Mostly the expanded competitive field will just mean more slots for the type of movies Oscar likes to nominate – i.e., serious dramas, message movies, period pieces, war films, and films that smell of prestige in some way (lauded source material, famous auteurs, you know the type).” I’m skeptical of his skepticism – at least looking backward.
I’ll start with an admonition: You have no reason not to have a horse in the short-film categories for the Oscars. These should be your favorite races, because they require relatively small investments of time. If you see and hate The Reader, you’ve lost 124 minutes of your life. If you see and hate Lavatory – Lovestory, you’re out 10 minutes. And the chances of you hating Lavatory – Lovestory are much smaller. Alas, each has about the same chance of winning the top prize in its category.
When people talk about Oscar snubs, they’re usually speaking emotionally. But we can quantify snubs, at least when it comes to Best Picture. You’ll need to accept one major assumption: that critics in the aggregate are good arbiters of the quality of films. Here is a list of movies – the Best Picture nominees, other serious contenders, and a few never-weres – ranked by their combined scores from Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic.
It’s too long. We’re miffed by the nominations, and sometimes the process itself. The production numbers are cheesy and interminable. We’re displeased with the final results more often than not. Years later, we’re typically embarrassed by the outcome. So let’s scrap the Oscars and replace this evil with another: We’ll choose the best movie of the year through something similar to the presidential-selection process.
Between the initial calculations and now, my Box Office Power Rankings-derived formula has not changed its Oscar conclusion: No Country for Old Men is still your Best Picture winner on Sunday.
A few months ago, I promised that I’d try to use the basic Box Office Power Rankings formula to predict a Best Picture winner. The hypothesis is that Best Picture winners tend to have a blend of prestige and popularity, and that a quantitative measure of those qualities might have predictive value.
Both Brokeback Mountain and Munich are patient, well-made genre movies that strip most of the politics out of charged subjects. Sadly, both are also botches.
