The biggest change to this year’s Oscars is the widening of the Best Picture field. We sure had fun debating this back in June when the Academy announced the effective doubling of the class of ’10, but how do we feel now that we officially have 10 Best Picture nominees this year? Ellen Wernecke thinks we’re going to be just fine; Dennis Anderson isn’t so sure.

Ellen

The Oscars are upon us once again and you and I have a lot of homework to do. For those of us who insist on being informed moviegoers, award season is occasionally a frantic rush to squeeze in a few more viewing hours before the big night, especially since last summer when the Academy heaped on more work in the form of an expanded Best Picture field. As of early Wednesday morning as I write this, I have only District 9 yet to watch, and on the basis of 9 mostly solid movie-going experiences I’m prepared to say: May the Best Picture win! Here’s why I think the Academy should keep the widened field:

Every additional slot could mean an otherwise overlooked movie gets a broader audience. Avatar didn’t need the Academy’s help, but The Hurt Locker, an indie that snuck into theatres in the summer when even ardent movie buffs (ahem, me) didn’t bother to make time for it. Whether it wins Best Picture or not—and there are many who think it should—the exposure has been great for the picture in general and underrated director Kathryn Bigelow in particular. While I for one would prefer to never read another “Kathryn Bigelow directs MAN movies” trend piece, I hope her moment in the sun allows her to pursue whatever project she wants next.

The din about the “arthouse” seems to have died down a little. The heaviest cudgel raised against the Oscars in recent years is that it doesn’t reflect what “real” Americans watch, because “real” Americans like Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen and The Squeakuel and drink beer and drive Fords and watch The Jay Leno Show. (I see stereotyped people. They don’t know they’re stereotyped.) Whether Hollywood is run by thusly defined “real” Americans or not isn’t the point, because it’s not a popular vote of all; it’s a popular vote among the film industry. Like any industry, it has its grudges, its bitchy insider tales and its standards. But okay, rest of America in a demographic that doesn’t really exist but has been exploited by politicians since Richard Nixon, here are a few movies like The Blind Side and Avatar and Precious: Based On The Novel Push By Sapphire that you may have accidentally seen after finishing Going Rogue for the fifth time. Now we can get back to excellence — or the opposite of same:

The threat of a bad movie winning is neutralized in company. I’ll let my cohort below handle The Blind Side, a movie that hit smack in the center of every expectation I had for it without a single surprise, and the bloated Ferngully ripoff Avatar, since we all know what’s wrong with it. (I hope.) Before “James Cameron’s Space Smurfs” opened, Up in the Air was widely acknowledged as the Best Picture frontrunner—i.e. this fact was printed over and over until it became accepted as the common opinion. I liked Up in the Air, but I didn’t fall for it, and rebelled against the tide that made it an inevitability that a movie about The Economy and People Making Connections and Vera Farmiga Being A Knockout would strike a chord with the American moviegoer. In a year with fewer Best Picture possibilities, that narrative wouldn’t have been challenged for months. Suddenly, Avatar made more money than Rain Man in the casino and we all had something to talk about — or in my case, something to appreciate about Up in the Air in that Farmiga was not forced to speak pidgin English and wear a leaf lei over her biologically incorrect bosoms.

Even if it fails, it can’t be said to have broken with tradition. Back when the Oscars were a slightly less bloated, much less colorfully televised affair, the number of nominees for each category fluctuated frequently from year to year. Imagine if, say, Academy voters had decided this year to nominate nine Best Songs instead of the typical five. Some of you would be looking for razor blades right now. (If John Legend was going to butcher all of them like he did with the Wall-E tune “Down to Earth” last year, I might be with you.) The award given to the movie Sunrise at the first Oscar ceremony, Best Artistic Quality of Production, doesn’t even exist any more—but, like the first 10 minutes of Up, if you can watch it without shedding a tear then you are clearly a robot.  If we can let go of a corner of the Best Picture prestige—whatever corner past travesties like Crash and Forrest Gump and the Peter Jackson merit badge for Return Of The King have not already occupied—we can accept that in the end, the only Best Picture vote that matters is yours.

Dennis

If anyone can remember way back to early last year (so quickly Oscar seasons fade from memory), there was a lot of shock and outrage over the exclusion of Christopher Nolan’s well-received Bat-sterpiece, The Dark Knight from the Academy’s final five. How could the less well-received The Reader have nabbed the fifth spot over Bruce Wayne and company?

Then, when it was announced some months later that for this year’s 82nd Annual Academy Awards that there were would be 10 nominees, right away many a journalist, blogger, and commenter alike claimed that now, more great movies like Dark Knight, or Wall-E would be recognized. As it turned out, with more Best Picture contenders this year, also came more head-scratcher nominations, and perhaps the head-scratchiest selections ever in the history of Oscar.

I certainly won’t mention what pictures should have been nominated. Sure I have some thoughts on the matter, but doesn’t everyone? But the simple notion that everyone can think of a movie or five that should’ve been nominated but wasn’t? That is the point. Or at least this helps me get to my point: The Academy’s selections, at least for awhile now, have been out of touch with any sort of cinephiles’ consensus and doubling the amount of nominees only makes this more glaringly obvious.

It’s easy to pick on The Reader. It’s easy to criticize Crash. It’s even fairly easy to pick on a more than halfway decent feel-good flick like Little Miss Sunshine for netting a nomination. These are the movies that large amounts of Oscar campaigning made a half-OK, undeserving film into a 100 percent overrated, oft-detested Best Picture nominee. But then there’s this year. And then there’s The Blind Side.

If The Reader was the misguided brat in last year’s graduating class at The School of Oscar, The Blind Side is the kid eating paste in the back of the class this year. It’s almost too easy to pick on The Blind Side. And yet, I will for argumentative purposes.

At the sake of full disclosure, I didn’t actually hate The Blind Side. It was sappier than uh, a tree, but it was almost entirely bearable to sit through. Quinton Aaron’s performance was understated and dare I say, underrated. Sandra Bullock deserved a nomination, and I won’t be bummed by her possible win on Sunday. But thing is, The Blind Side wasn’t one of the best pictures of the year. Not top five. Not top ten. Probably not even top twenty.

And therein lies the problem: If this were a year in which only five films were selected as a nominee for Best Picture of the year, The Blind Side wouldn’t have been nominated. Sure, an unnecessary film or four would have netted a slot. We would’ve griped that Up in the Air had pulled a Juno, or we would’ve been peeved that the 3D smurfs had shut Up out, but hey, The Blind Side? It would have never (hopefully?) been in the same breath as “best picture.”

Again, I’m trying not to pick on Blind Side (if I were I would’ve just abbreviated those two words. Sorry, low blow). If Blind Side hadn’t been nominated, I’m sure The Hangover, or (sorry, Sandra) The Proposal would’ve been anointed in its place. Not to sound like I’m paraphrasing a Spider-Man character, but with more nominations comes even more ridiculousness. And let’s leave the ridiculous where it belongs – at the Golden Globes.