The New 5% Rule At The Academy
Of course there is media that refuses to see anything at The Academy as well-intended. Everything is about ratings. Everything is cynical. Change is bad.
But in the case of the new rule that requires films to get 5% of the nomination vote to get a Best Picture nomination, there is ZERO benefit for the ratings. If anything, it hurts, because some pictures will get left out… and we have no idea whether those will be big pictures or small pictures. And of course, they Academy is not doing a nominations TV show, they are doing a show announcing the winners.
That said, this is a smart choice to legitimize the idea of more than 5 nominees… which remains a smart choice that is – as I keep saying – much more important to the indies than to the big studio movies. Let’s see a show of hands of people who think last year’s Oscars would have been better off without a Winter’s Bone nomination…. Anyone? Anyone?
Anyone who thinks we’ll be better off without Midnight in Paris or The Tree of Life getting nominated this year?
That said, they have made one mistake in this choice… and that’s limiting the nominations list to 10.
The rule should be as simple as they want to make it… 5% of the vote and you get a nomination. That could lead to 20 nominations. But as the board learned, history (and logic) tells us this won’t happen. But if one year, you get 8 nominees and the next, there are 12, I say, “God bless.”
If, say, the Top 9 films eat 85% of the votes and there are two films with over 5% after that, why should one be left off?
This is not a sport. This is a celebration of the movies people loved the prior year.
Odds are, there will never be more than 10 nominees. But if there are, what are we afraid of… too many films being embraced?
By 2013, The Academy should move voting to computers (with a print option that has a shorter voting window, for those who don’t want to go there), deliver ALL the eligible films that any studio/producer submits available to Academy voters by encrypted HD stream including docs and foreign language, and move the whole thing to the weekend before or after the Super Bowl.
It’s not about how the Golden Globes or BFCA will react… it’s about doing the best thing for the Academy Awards show and the idea behind it. We just don’t live in a culture anymore that waits 3 months for an answer. Use technology to move the process of voting and viewing into the 21st century while simplifying the experience of the show so that it’s fun again.
This year’s Tonys kicked the crap out of most Oscar shows. And very few people know who the people winning awards are. But the show entertained. And the feelings of the winners were infectious. Add movie stars and stir.
The opening number at the Tonys was better than anything the Oscars has done in a decade.
Neil Patrick Harris is awesome.
This is a strange curveball. But this has got to be pretty good news for you since this should increase advertising in the hope of reaching that 5% threshold.
So before while it was looking like there would be pertpetual Weinstein slot, Pixar slot, Searchlight slot etc…. everybody is going to have to reach a higher bar.
The more I think about it I like the idea of admitting that there needs to be ten slots to honor the best, but hey, not every year. Seems like it would make sense to expand this idea to the other major categories.
“Anyone who thinks we’ll be better off without… The Tree of Life getting nominated this year?”
Raises hand. Unless it’s the Razzies.
“MOTHER. FATHER. ALWAYS YOU RASSLE INSIDE ME!”
If you didn’t feel compelled to fire your 32oz Guzzler at the screen right then and there while fighting back the laughter…
The Tonys are always the best awards show, because almost everyone onstage is used to being onstage!
Ken Levine made a brilliant point on his blog: every week, tens of millions of people faithfully watch amateurs who can’t sing and has-been celebs who can’t dance, but wouldn’t be caught dead watching the finest musical talent in the business performing on the Tonys.
I liked 10! So what if something iffy gets in there — heck, if they only nominated TWO films, at least one of them would probably be meh anyway.
It seems clear to me that this is in response to some of the game theory involved in the system of the past two years.
in the system we had the past two years, there was easily enough in the animation branch that if every academy member in that branch put animation movies in their top three or four films, all their votes would be redistributed to the top animated film vote getter and an animated film would be guaranteed a nomination every year. This year we won’t see every Kung Fu Panda/Dreamworks animator’s vote redistributed from KFP to Cars 2, thus ensuring a Cars 2 BP nomination. Without this rule change, I guarantee we would have had another animated film nominated for Best Picture; with this rule, I would expect the major animated films to earn 1-2% each, but the support for them will not be aggregated into a consensus nomination the old system would have resulted in.
Before 09, there were other ways to game the system as well, with ranked/runoff balloting, as Harvey Weinstein has shown, getting many nominations on the backs of two and three votes.
This makes earning a nomination all about getting a number one vote, one man, one vote, more or less, when it comes to best picture nominations. That’s going to make it much harder on someone like Weinstein to earn the soft support he’s used to getting, as now he’ll have to rely on getting #1 votes for films like Chocolat.
And it is a Hell of a lot harder to persuade people to vote against their passion (#1 choice) than it is to ask for downballot support of a ‘small’ movie that “needs” your help.
There aren’t many animators in the academy, so your thoughts about that don’t make sense.
Just another rule to screw Nolan. THEY ARE ALWAYS SCREWING NOLAN, THESE PEOPLE!
I didn’t read the whole rules but what would happen if, say, only 2-3 films capitalize on 95% or more of the votes? Is that all the nominees for that year?
I don’t think they even considered that, but will fill the gap at some point. I’m sure the bottom will be 5 films. Pretty clear that they got a report from the accountants that told them that the number would vary between 6 and 10 each year.
I thought the new rule was for BP noms to get 5% of the First-Place Votes. Isn’t that a distinction worth mentioning? Doesn’t it mean a movie might get 20% second-place votes, but still not matter?
There’s a thing called the surplus rule designed just for that, krazyeyes. It’s complicated, but it redistributes the excess vote and gives you a full slate of nominees.
David Poland wrote: Odds are, there will never be more than 10 nominees. But if there are, what are we afraid of… too many films being embraced?”
YES! Exactly!! What is this, the Special Olympics? There’s no need to reward every Tom, Dick and Mary who managed to get a film made. What, really, are the odds of a film getting 3% of the nominating vote walking off w/the BP hardware? You’re saying it’s not a sport but it’s still a competition and who’s going to take it seriously if they dilute the field to include a buncha Tiny Tims running in a field full of Jesse Owenses?
If no one finds out the percentages of the votes the noms get either heading into final ballot or after the statues have been handed out, why not set a contingent bar? Who needs to see more pretentious, self-aggrandizing air kisses to a few people representing films that nobody saw? I’m all for the little guy getting the hot chick sympathy screw but at what cost? What benifit for the audience? Even if they opened up the field to 10 two years ago and maybe The Dark Knight made the cut, does it really do anybody any good if its 4% vote margin has as much legitimacy as a Pat Buchanan presidential campaign?
I don’t know how the whole thing works in actuality vs how it’s supposed to happen in theory. Do people vote for the films and people based on what they like or what they’re supposed to vote for? Per the GroupThink theory being bandied around the past week, nowhere does the probability seem to exist than the AMPAS. And if it doesn’t, it’s been classified and analyzed and speculated as such for decades. I could go for there being a changing number of nominees based on percentage. Some years you have 7 others 10, works for me. But despite all the success VCU and Seattle had in the playoffs, if someone doesn’t belong in the field, they shouldn’t be there. There is another risk of a homogenized view of what is deemed worthy and what is not, which I think is an important issue to be dissected but I find that to be mutually exclusive of having two drink minimum attached.
I write all this when admittedly I won’t watch the show, won’t care outside an office pool who won but I do think credibility is an issue the Academy needs to address. It may be a quick fix but raising standards can be a way to boost one’s image with the public. Maybe it does nothing, since who knows how close to the floor some films were, and the same results they wish to achieve could be better served with a higher number. I just don’t find it to be detrimental to the body or show itself.