![]() Special arrangements have doubtless been made to ensure the integrity of the envelopes, but the more lasting legacy of last year’s upset can be seen in the unusual inscrutability of the best picture tea leaves. The effects of this sea change are being felt in this year’s particularly wide-open race. The 2012 best picture win by “The Artist,” Michel Hazanavicius’ loving ode to silent filmmaking, may not have aged quite as well, but it, too, exemplifies the academy’s willingness to dismantle easy assumptions of what a best picture can be. It would be hard to find a more suitable David-and-Goliath metaphor than the triumph of Kathryn Bigelow’s low-budget, low-grossing Iraq War thriller, “The Hurt Locker,” over James Cameron’s record-shattering 3-D blockbuster “Avatar” in 2010. The rationale behind these splits has been surprisingly intuitive, even discerning: While the academy has recently handed its directing prizes to bravura technical achievements such as “Gravity,” “The Revenant” and “La La Land,” it tellingly chose to give best picture in those corresponding years to “12 Years a Slave,” “Spotlight” and “Moonlight” - dramas that were smaller in scale and budget, perhaps, but arguably larger in emotional depth and social-political resonance.Įven when there hasn’t been a picture-director split, we’ve seen a welcome shift in perspective: No longer do voters automatically equate the biggest with the best. That arrangement almost certainly accounts for the recent disparities between the picture and director categories, a once infrequent occurrence - few films won best picture without first winning best director - that has now become commonplace. (Two years later, the rules were tweaked again to accommodate anywhere between five and 10 picture nominees that system remains in place today.) With this expansion, the organization also reinstated a preferential ballot that allows members to rank all the best picture nominees, rather than simply vote for one favorite. In 2009, the academy announced that, for the first time since 1945, the best picture category would boast 10 nominees rather than five. It’s a process that continually seeks change and renewal, dislodging frontrunners and elevating underdogs for the mere sake of keeping the conversation fresh.īut in all likelihood, the most significant shift in the best picture Oscar algorithm has been simple mathematics. Awards season, already interminable for those who follow it, has become a protracted opportunity to digest and redigest the same movies again and again, to circulate reviews, think pieces, points and counterpoints endlessly on social media. Another factor is the ever shifting dynamics of film discussion in the internet age (which helped turn #OscarsSoWhite into a rallying cry). ![]()
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