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They shouldn't be so obsessed with shortening the show in the first place, but even accepting that as a motivation, they should keep the expanded BP field so more people can see more titles that otherwise wouldn't play outside of the top 50 cities. From my perspective, the awards matter primarily as a way of driving people toward films they otherwise wouldn't or couldn't see, so I'm not particularly concerned with diminishing the exclusivity of the nominees.

I like the expanded field also, but to be honest, for several years now the nominations have been more interesting to me than the actual awards. This year I didn't even watch the show except for a few minutes at the end, but every year I'm still pretty geared up to see what's nominated.

domino harvey wrote: Wed Apr 03, 2019 5:58 pm They should absolutely go back to five nominees for Best Pic, but I’m not impartial given my commitment! Still, it used to mean something more when you made the cut of five, now with the weird 8-9 sliding scale, it’s a bit less impressive

I prefer having more than five, so more films I actually like make it there as well, but ideally having more than five doesn't mean letting more awful Oscar bait films like last year.
I agree the nominations mean way more. I was more happy to see Phantom Thread get a lot of love in nominations, knew for sure it won't win any of the majors.

The Academy approved some new rules for this year — including a nonsensical name change for the Foreign Film category, and a welcome expansion of the shortlist for that category — while voting to maintain the seven-day theatrical screening requirement (which some had been pushing to change to four weeks to make eligibility more difficult for Netflix).

To be honest, the designation "foreign language" always seemed a little off to me, more for practical reasons. It really sank in when films like Letters from Iwo Jima (clearly a Hollywood studio film, and a great one IMHO) were nominated for "foreign language film" elsewhere but not the Oscar equivalent due to different rules of eligibility. You have to wonder whether the category's name was a little ill-fitting, especially when you think about which films the category is really for and why you have it to begin with.

At long last, there will be five nominees for Make-up & Hairstyling. The fact that it was the only remaining category with just three nominations (after the Sound Editing and VFX expansion years ago) stood out like a sore thumb to me.

hearthesilence wrote: Wed Apr 24, 2019 2:42 pm To be honest, the designation "foreign language" always seemed a little off to me, more for practical reasons. It really sank in when films like Letters from Iwo Jima (clearly a Hollywood studio film, and a great one IMHO) were nominated for "foreign language film" elsewhere but not the Oscar equivalent due to different rules of eligibility. You have to wonder whether the category's name was a little ill-fitting, especially when you think about which films the category is really for and why you have it to begin with.

Oh, I have no problem with getting rid of the “Best Foreign Language Film” title, but calling it “Best International Film” without changing the eligibility requirements makes even less sense. The BAFTAs use “Best Film not in the English Language”, which is clunky but at least accurate.

Best non-Hollywood film in a language other than English?

DarkImbecile wrote: Wed Apr 24, 2019 2:55 pm

hearthesilence wrote: Wed Apr 24, 2019 2:42 pm To be honest, the designation "foreign language" always seemed a little off to me, more for practical reasons. It really sank in when films like Letters from Iwo Jima (clearly a Hollywood studio film, and a great one IMHO) were nominated for "foreign language film" elsewhere but not the Oscar equivalent due to different rules of eligibility. You have to wonder whether the category's name was a little ill-fitting, especially when you think about which films the category is really for and why you have it to begin with.

Oh, I have no problem with getting rid of the “Best Foreign Language Film” title, but calling it “Best International Film” without changing the eligibility requirements makes even less sense. The BAFTAs use “Best Film not in the English Language”, which is clunky but at least accurate.

The whole category needs an overhaul. Whenever a celebrated AND popular film like Yi Yi or Three Colors failed to get nominated, the answer usually had something to do with eligibility requirements. In the former, every movie had to be formally submitted by a country, and since there was a limit of ONE film per country, Taiwan chose Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon which to be fair won. Films from the latter were truly international productions that involved money or authority from different European countries, and somehow that knocked them all out of the submission process.

At the 67th Oscars, THREE COLORS: WHITE was submitted for Poland (but wasn't accepted as a nominee), whereas THREE COLORS: RED was submitted by Switzerland, but was disqualified when it wasn't considered a "majority Swiss" production (also WILD REEDS was submitted that year by France, so France was not submitting any of the THREE COLORS films). I am unsure why THREE COLORS: BLUE was not submitted (it would have fallen under the 66th Oscars, but France submitted GERMINAL that year).

Scorsese defends Netflix

criterionoop wrote: Wed Apr 24, 2019 10:34 pm At the 67th Oscars, THREE COLORS: WHITE was submitted for Poland (but wasn't accepted as a nominee), whereas THREE COLORS: RED was submitted by Switzerland, but was disqualified when it wasn't considered a "majority Swiss" production (also WILD REEDS was submitted that year by France, so France was not submitting any of the THREE COLORS films). I am unsure why THREE COLORS: BLUE was not submitted (it would have fallen under the 66th Oscars, but France submitted GERMINAL that year).

Ah, thanks for filling out the details and corrections. I could never remember why Red wasn't nominated, just that it sounded like a silly technicality.

Should also be said that Yi Yi couldn't have been submitted by Taiwan (regardless of Crouching Tiger) because Yang wouldn't allow it to be released there—it had some one-off screenings at festivals and retrospectives, but it didn't get an actual theatrical run until 2017 to mark the tenth anniversary of Yang's death. I'm not entirely clear on the reasons, but from a couple of interviews I read it appears Yang felt no Taiwanese distributor could handle it properly. Ideally the Academy would just drop the formal country-of-origin requirements and open the category up to any non-English film released in the U.S. during the eligibility period. The current rules make it possible for a film to be nominated without a U.S. distributor, which is nice in theory since it means the nominees aren't restricted to whatever distributors find worthy of attention, but in practice it's very rare that a film gets a nomination without a distributor, and I think it would be worth it to eliminate the reliance on national selection committees restricted to one submission and one submission only.

Geena Davis, too.

domino harvey wrote: Wed Apr 03, 2019 5:58 pm They should absolutely go back to five nominees for Best Pic, but I’m not impartial given my commitment! Still, it used to mean something more when you made the cut of five, now with the weird 8-9 sliding scale, it’s a bit less impressive

I agree with you but I also appreciate the box office draw that is given to lesser known films. This may not be the best example, but I probably never would have seen Whiplash if not for its BP nom and I probably enjoyed it more than almost any other nominee that year even if I didn't think it deserved to win. Not that they would do it, but what would you think of five nominees but then a list of 5ish "honorable mentions" that are definitively not in the running for the award but get called out by the AMPAS?

HitchcockLang wrote: Mon Jun 03, 2019 6:13 pm

domino harvey wrote: Wed Apr 03, 2019 5:58 pm They should absolutely go back to five nominees for Best Pic, but I’m not impartial given my commitment! Still, it used to mean something more when you made the cut of five, now with the weird 8-9 sliding scale, it’s a bit less impressive

I agree with you but I also appreciate the box office draw that is given to lesser known films. This may not be the best example, but I probably never would have seen Whiplash if not for its BP nom and I probably enjoyed it more than almost any other nominee that year even if I didn't think it deserved to win. Not that they would do it, but what would you think of five nominees but then a list of 5ish "honorable mentions" that are definitively not in the running for the award but get called out by the AMPAS?

I also think AMPAS should go back to five nominees, not that I necessarily care who wins. In either case, it does seem the kinds of films that dominate the awards season slate have changed in the last 15-20 years. In the late nineties and early twenties awards season was largely dominated by the prestige projects of the major studios along with the Weinstein machine. And each year would have it's token specialty film vying for a Best Picture nomination: Lost In Translation, The Pianist, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind(although perhaps Sideways was the one that actually wound up getting nominated that year), etc. But now, it seems to be the specialty films that dominate the slate each season. Then you have the token blockbuster, like Black Panther or Dunkirk. Maybe that's a simply a reflection of changes in the types of films that get made now. They just don't make films "like" A Beautiful Mind, Cold Mountain, and Gladiator anymore it seems, the Big Studio prestige projects.

I don't think AMPAS has necessarily lost touch. Hollywood simply stopped making the "middlebrow tentpole" films like A Beautiful Mind, Platoon, Braveheart and so on that used to be the bread and butter of awards season and could galvanise the attention of a large cross section of society.

I don't think the theatrical audiences for films like The Favourite, Phantom Thread, and Call Me By Your Name would have been any different twenty years ago than they are in the late 2010s.

Just my thoughts.

I realize I may not be responding directly to any specific post here with some of my comments. My apologies in advance.

P.S. I also think the culture and zeitgeist have changed and that circa 2000 some of the recent specialty films like The Favourite, Phantom Thread, and CMBYN would have likely had to settle for acting and screenplay nods, and possibly Best Director without Best Picture ala Mulholland Drive.

Green Book, Darkest Hour, The Post, Hidden Figures, American Sniper, Theory of Everything, Imitation Game. The list runs on. There's always at least one middle brow Oscar bait film that's nominated (not a mark against some of the film's quality; I'm quite fond of The Post). There are also some Oscar bait that is in some ways different (The Martian, Brooklyn, A Star Is Born, Vice) and again I'm not talking about their merits and quality.
This is why I like the up to 10 nominees. It lets the lesser films get in (and even it sometimes fucks up, See - Beale Street)

dda1996a wrote: Sat Jun 15, 2019 6:00 pm Green Book, Darkest Hour, The Post, Hidden Figures, American Sniper, Theory of Everything, Imitation Game. The list runs on. There's always at least one middle brow Oscar bait film that's nominated (not a mark against some of the film's quality; I'm quite fond of The Post). There are also some Oscar bait that is in some ways different (The Martian, Brooklyn, A Star Is Born, Vice) and again I'm not talking about their merits and quality.
This is why I like the up to 10 nominees. It lets the lesser films get in (and even it sometimes fucks up, See - Beale Street)

Well The Master, Carol, and Foxcatcher also somehow missed out in a field of up to 10. Although Carol still seems to divide people, and I don't think its divisiveness necessarily had to do with the LGBQT factor. See Moonlight and CMBYN.

You're right that middlebrow Oscar bait films still sneak in every year, and in some cases, even win, such as in the case of Green Book, but they don't seem to galvanise media attention the way films like A Beautiful Mind and Shakespeare in Love did, and that may simply be the sign of a changing zeitgeist. It could be generational too. I know I'm generalizing, but I always felt baby boomers fell more easily for middlebrow Oscar bait fare than Gen-Xers did. I'm a Millennial by the way.

Punishing your peers for getting financing to make films from the places that are willing to offer them financing doesn't seem like the coolest way to go, but maybe I'm missing something here

mfunk9786 wrote: Wed Jun 26, 2019 7:38 pm Punishing your peers for getting financing to make films from the places that are willing to offer them financing doesn't seem like the coolest way to go, but maybe I'm missing something here

No you're correct. It strikes me as a really passive aggressive way to try and force relevance when it's so absolutely trivial in my mind.

This doesn’t seem like that big of a deal. Streaming platforms can do a one week qualifying run in LA like countless other movies have done long before Netflix et al came on the scene, and this change would not have altered any previous nomination or win

And the streaming company have an easy loophole if they want to be passive aggressive in return: they could block book all the tickets when they rent the theatre. So Netflix could rent out a screen at the landmark for a week, buy every ticket for every showtime scheduled before they go “on sale” and then no one gets to see it in theatres before it airs on Netflix. The dga rules are complied with and Netflix still gets their way.