Monkey Business: The Academy’s Extremely Lost and Incredibly Confused Year

By Jennifer Sperber

The Oscar nominations are finally in and there’s a lot to discuss. There’s the surprise nods for Nick Nolte (!) and Demian Bichir (who?), the snubs of Michael Fassbender (a shame) and Albert Brooks (what??), the excrement trending in the Supporting Actress category (sigh), and Hugo’s domination with eleven noms.

But the most shocking, and most discussion-worthy reveal of all is, of course, the nine flicks up for Best Picture, the most prestigious title at the most prestigious awards ceremony.  What happens to all the prestige when there are just too many movies up for consideration?

Back in June, MPAA president Tom Sherak introduced the new sliding scale rule for the Best Picture nominations, discarding the still-fresh ten-picture policy in favor of a voting system in which anywhere from five to ten films could be nominated. All a given movie had to do was secure 5% of first-place votes on the nomination ballots. There are approximately 6,000 actors, directors, writers, producers, editors, artists, and moguls in the Academy. That means a movie needs around 300 people to say it’s their favorite of the year to score a nomination.

I wrote in October that the 5% rule was a likely way for the Academy to inch back towards all those tried-and-true five-picture years, to pretend like they weren’t reversing course while completely reversing course. A lot of analysts and critics in the film industry predicted 6-7 films to be nominated. That sounded reasonable, and the theory behind the new system sounded like it made sense. Some years do have a greater number of good movies. If it’s just a mediocre year, only five pictures will make it to the show. If we have a 1994 on our hands (Forrest Gump, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Pulp Fiction, The Shawshank Redemption, Quiz Show), then more than five will be nominated, perhaps seven or eight (tack on The Lion King, Ed Wood, maybe even The Crow).

But that’s not what happened. 2011 was not 1994. Instead of the number of nominees proportionately reflecting the quality of the films in 2011, votes were so spread across the board that even the poorly-reviewed Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close slipped onto the list. The new rules are flawed. The Academy screwed up.

These are the results:

The well-reviewed predictable Best Pic films: The Artist, The Descendants, Hugo

The second-tier Oscar bait (hook, line, and sinker) movies: War Horse, Moneyball

The feel-good summer popcorn flick: The Help

The polarizing lesson in cinematography: Tree of Life

The unusual nostalgia-lover’s vacation: Midnight in Paris

The polka-dotted elephant in the room: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

So how did all these movies make it to the Best Picture shortlist?

Just for the sake of picking on it, let’s look at the biggest surprise in the category: Extremely Loud. It was the recipient of solid hype throughout the summer and into the awards pre-season. It turned out to be a controversial, polarizing film on a sensitive (emotionally-manipulative, some would argue) topic that was completely panned upon its release (it currently scores a weak 46 on Metacritic and 48% on Rotten Tomatoes). So how in the world did it find itself sneaking out of Jennifer Lawrence’s mouth and onto the list of Best Picture nominees?

Consider this: there’s an old guy named Harold that directed one movie and a couple of shorts that were pretty slick back in 1985 and was subsequently invited into the Academy.  His wife likes Tom Hanks, so in December, he takes her to the theater to check out Extremely Loud.  They hold hands and cry and think about 9/11 and talk about what a nice couple Tom and Sandra would make in real life and how adorable the Jeopardy kid acts. 

The next day, while Harold is cleaning out his sock drawer, he puts a Shame screener into his laptop (because that would be awkward to watch with his family) and follows it up with Rise of the Planet of the Apes and then Drive. He gets a little tired mid-way through the triple-feature (because of all his hard work with the socks), so he pauses and goes out to Friday’s with his wife. He finishes Drive the next day, while he eats some left-over potato skins and thinks about how much better they tasted at the restaurant. 

The nomination ballot arrives at his house a few days later and what does Harold do?  Perhaps he remembers his most enjoyable, most focused, most emotional, most relaxed movie experience in his past few weeks of cramming Oscar bait flicks. Guess what Harold writes in that #1 spot? Yeah. So do 299 other voters.

A night out on the town with the Missus, a cluttered sock drawer, some leftovers. A passion for baseball, a favorite spot in Paris, an admiration for that aging Scorsese guy.  Anything can sway an Academy member; they’re actually just like you or me. The new rules were supposed to compensate for that, a greater sample size leaves less room for error.  But 5% of votes is not a lot.  Clearly, 300 people out of 6,000 are not enough to create big-picture discretion—because nine movies is just too many, particularly when this batch is the result.

Just do the math. WIth nine movies, at least 5% of first place votes went towards each, which means we know for sure what happened to 45% of the votes.  But how does this system account for the other 55%? 

I’d guess that The Artist snagged somewhere around 40% of all first-place votes, Hugo reeled in maybe 10% with The Descendants trailing right behind, and then, lagging at that 5.1% line were the rest of the nominees.  Certainly, plenty of voters don’t see their first choice up there on the Best Picture list at all; these floater votes aren’t represented anywhere in the nomination process, whereas every voter mattered under the old system of single-transferable voting, which resulted in a more general consensus vote. 

And does it not devalue the rarity and honor of a nomination to throw Extremely Loud and War Horse, movies that overpromised and underdelivered, up there with the beloved frontrunner The Artist?  Why bother—when they, and other movies, only have something like a 5% shot at taking home the statue?

All of these number-of-nominees rule changes reflect the Academy’s perpetual desire to make the telecast more popular with a broader audience. When the number was doubled to ten nominations in 2009, then President of the Academy Sidney Ganis mentioned “The Dark Knight snub” as an example of why the slate needed to be expanded. 

Two years of backlash later, Sherak (who was reportedly the mastermind behind the 2009 expansion) made the move on this 5-10 business, still trying to please both film connoisseurs and the mass population.  Irony would have it that he winds up now with nine potentially polarizing movies that (except for possibly The Help) haven’t even been seen by many people. Because if you can’t stand silent movies, movies about silent movies, horses, baseball, artsy shots of trees, Woody Allen’s infatuation with Paris, a women’s popcorn version of civil rights, George Clooney as an inexplicable shmuck, or 9/11 exploitation, then this was not the year for you.

For too long now, the Academy Awards have been very afraid to admit they are the Academy Awards. Chosen by the industry folk, for the industry folk. So here’s what Tom Sherak and the Academy and everyone involved in pandering for Academy votes need to get through their heads:

Oscar hype is poison to the Oscars:  Too much rides on the campaigning process and predictions that are made months and months early. Academy members are just as prone as anyone to make a foregone conclusion based on someone else’s mere speculation.

It is not better to be safe than sorry:  When the Best Picture winner is complained about in retrospect, it has always been another nominee—not some random film that wasn’t even nominated—that people wish had won. It is better to nominate three truly wonderful films (encouraging people to actually go see them; few average moviegoers will actually see nine) instead of putting up eight or nine mediocre pictures with one or two four-star flicks hidden in there. Legitimacy is lost.

Viewership of the telecast shouldn’t be a factor: Nominating movies based on their box office or popularity tosses aside the show’s integrity, and nominating only limited-release middlebrow dramas and indie flicks won’t draw in the general population’s interest. Yes, I see the conflict. Now get over it. There’s nothing Tom Sherak or James Franco or Brett Ratner or Inception can do to solve it.

The Oscars are not the Golden Globes or People’s Choice Awards or the SAGs.  This is a good thing:  The Oscars are having an identity crisis. If the Academy wants to solidify the show as the most-watched, most-widely-known, most-trusted awards ceremony, then it needs to stop messing with its formula. Staying current is one thing, trying too hard is another.

My prediction for the Oscars?

We’ll be back to five Best Picture nominations in 2013. Tom Sherak won’t be AMPAS President anymore because his four allowed one-year terms will be up, opening the door for someone new to inch in and give us our old Oscars back.

Start your ballots!  Watch all those movies you thought you wouldn’t need to watch (Extremely Loud)!  And please join the campaign for Jennifer Sperber for AMPAS President 2013.  Nominations will be generated by Watson the computer, winners chosen by Jennifer, and awards presented by puppies.

More Oscar news and predictions to come!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jennifer Sperber currently studies Dramatic Writing at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. When she’s not writing film or television, or writing about it, she is usually watching it.