Ah, thanks for the correction. Um, and -- d'uh.


What I hate, hate, hate about this is that animated films and foreign language film will likely still be relegated to their own category, as if it were impossible for one of them to actually be among the best pictures of the year.

Beauty and the Beast proved otherwise, and not simply because there was no animated category at the time. It was plain and simple one of the year's very best movies. And the same is true of the film I so stupidly misquoted, The Incredibles.



Where is the link to this? I just can't believe it. Though with ratings tumbling even with what I thought was their best awards show in years, I guess they have to pull whatever shenanigans they believe will include at least some pictures someone has seen in the main event.

Haha:


Though I suppose 8 of the ten will be released in December ... still, it's been quite the cruddy year for "Oscar-type" films. Or is this their bid to indeed include popular films like Harry Potter?

Great, now "nominated for Best Picture" means nothing.

I've now heard (on the Hollywood chatter sites, don't know how reliable) that the expectation is that this will get quality foreign language and feature animation into the best picture pool (wonder if that will produce a return to the early years of the best foreign language category when because of different eligibility rules for best picture and foreign language you'd often have the same movie nominated in successive years for the two categories). Apparently the thinking is that if Up doesn't get a best picture nom with the expanded pool that then they'll dump the animation category altogether since it is obviously ghettoizing the genre.

I'm not necessarily opposed to 10 nominations (it was that way for the first decade or so anyway) as there's nothing magical about 5, and it should help dilute the nomination politicking while maintaining the overall advertising dollars. I just don't see how it could possibly be good for the show unless they dump other categories. Back when they used to have 8-12 best picture nominations they had fewer categories and most only had 3 nominees.

But it could be worse. In 1934 there were 18 nominations for Best Assistant Director.

I guess it was too much to hope that the new transformer movie would measure up to the origional. Rotton Tomatos has it at 22%.

I'm hearing such consistently horrible things about it that I'm tempted to go see it just so I can honestly rag on it.

The first one was so miserably bad that I haven't been at all interesting but I'm wondering if it is possible that it is had descended through that floor and into enjoyably mockably bad.

Though thinking about the nominees thing, since the official explanation is that sometimes there are just too many deserving movies I think this might be a way to reflect that:

When the nominating ballots go out, have each member vote on their 5 picks for Best Picture, then consider nominated any movie that makes some percentage (say 40%) of the total ballots with a minimum of five and a maximum of 10.

This would guarantee that any film nominated had a significant amount of support for it.

Saw Frost/Nixon today. I liked it. Solid performances. Slow in places, but all in all, I liked it.

Oh, and just to avoid pulling scabs off wounds not yet healed, my comments above were not in any way meant as a judgment of people who erroneously enjoyed the first Transformers movie.

From Roger Ebert's blog expanding on his very negative review of Transformers 2: