Is this 10 Best Picture nominations such a good idea?

These 10 Best Picture nominations are all well and good but don’t they kind of de-value getting one?

Look at this year’s 10. Can anyone honestly say half (arguably more) of these films will survive in people’s memories beyond this year? I really enjoyed An Education, but Best Picture? A Serious Man feels like it’s there because it’s the Coen brothers rather than really deserving the place. Blind Side, what’s that about?

The main reason I got thinking about this though is the presence of Up.

Pixar churns out a masterpiece so often we’re going to have to invent a new word for them because they are devaluing the concept of masterpieces. You want a masterpiece every so often across the industry not every damn year from the same studio! But many people I know, and I think I’d include myself in this, would argue Up isn’t the best animated film of 2009 – Coraline is.

Others may disagree with that assessment but even so, doesn’t having Up in the Best Picture category (as surely WALL-E would have been last year if there had been 10 and Pixar films going forward may become a regular fixture of) kind of make the Best Animated Feature category a foregone conclusion?

Many think this about the BAFTAs where they have both a Best Film and Best British Film category. Frequently one of the 5 nominations for Best Film is British but this same film fails to win Best British Film. For example the past three years has seen a British film, nominated for Best British Film, win the Best Film category: 2008 – Slumdog Millionaire, 2007 – Atonement, 2006 – The Queen. And yet despite winning Best Film not one of those three managed to win Best British Film! These instead went to: 2008 – Man On Wire, 2007 – This Is England, 2006 – The Last King Of Scotland. This leads to perfectly reasonable queries of “how the hell does that happen?”

But there is actually an explanation for this phenomenon. It’s not a great explanation, but it is at least, well, one. The whole Bafta membership votes to decide both the 5 nominees for Best Film and the eventual winner. However a select committee awards Best British Film so the general consensus of the membership need not be reflected. It may be a bit daft but it explains the disparity.

However, if such a disparity happens at the Oscars such an explanation will not stand. The Best Picture nominations and eventual winner, as I understand it, are the same – selected by the whole membership – so it stands to reason Up is considered the best animated film since it is the only animated film up for Best Picture. However the whole membership also votes for the winner of the Best Animated Feature nominees. Therefore is there anyway in which Up can lose, and if it does it has to leave everyone scratching their head and going “How?”

But the extension of the category to 10 and the inclusion of Up brings up a bigger issue of de-valuation of the category. It was inevitable that the very first report I read about the Oscar nominations after they were announced yesterday would state (and it did) that Up was “only the second animated feature ever to receive a best picture nomination”.

Doesn’t this de-value the nomination for 1991’s Beauty And The Beast. This is truly the only animated film ever to receive a best picture nomination.

Sure the odds were stacked against it happening again once the Best Animated Feature category was introduced. Too many voters would see that as award enough and not consider an animated feature for the big prize – although they have always been allowed to. The Golden Globes exclude animated features from being considered for Best Film, but then they segregate everything. Their Best Film is split into Drama and Musical/Comedy so it seems fair enough that Animation’s own category is essential just a third version of the big prize. But Oscar doesn’t do that and nor should it.

Yet animation has consistently been overlooked since the creation of its own category (well, and before, but still).

You can argue the same for Foreign Language. They have their own category after all and yet over the years they’ve been far more likely (Life Is Beautiful, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Il Postino, Letters From Iwo Jima) to get a Best Picture nomination, as well as consideration is other categories (City Of God and Talk To Her both received director noms although they missed out on Best Picture).

But this isn’t really the seen as being the same. The foreign language films category is only open to a single film from each country and that whatever the country submits. The rules of the category often exclude multi-country co-productions like Michael Haneke’s Hidden or Walter Salles’ The Motorcycle Diaries and a film like Letters From Iwo Jima could never be considered because despite being entirely filmed in Japanese it’s an American production. Politics play a big part. The Spanish industry, not wanting the world to think the Spanish film industry consists of nothing but the Oscar and Bafta friendly Pedro Almodovar rarely selects his films as the Spanish entry. Hence the year Talk To Her was nominated for the Best Director Oscar and won Best Original Screenplay it wasn’t eligible for Best Foreign Language Film. Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s A Very Long Engagement was funded by Warner Bros France and so the French refused to consider it French (a marked difference from the UK Film Council which considers pretty much any film that has even contemplated hiring a British gaffer as a British film!) and so no selection for Jeunet.

The other problem is to vote for the foreign language nominees an Oscar member has to have seen them all on a big screen so often this falls to older, retired members and harsher-themed movies lose out to windy-sentimentalism. City Of God was Brazil’s entry for Best Foreign Language Film in 2002. It should have won. Instead it failed even to garner a nomination, while the likes of Dutch rom com Zus & Zo did! This balance was redressed somewhat following its proper US release in 2003 which led to 4 Oscar nominations for Director, Screenplay, Cinematography and Editing (although it didn’t win any).

Therefore considering a foreign film for best picture may be seen as redressing an imbalance that can, and frequently does, exist it that category.

Animated Feature doesn’t have that luxury. The nominations and eventual winner process are as straight-forward as those for any of the other big categories. So logically there’s no imbalance to address and no need to give them a seat at the big table.

But now we have 10 nominees so why not throw them a bone? Why not include that animated film you enjoyed so much. Two simple reasons:

1 – it makes a mockery of the Best Animated Feature category. If only one of them makes the Best Picture nominees then the teams behind the other four might as well just turn up. And if they do miraculously win then it surely suggests there’s something wrong with the selection of the 10 Best Pictures!

2 – it de-values Beauty & The Beast’s nomination. In 10 tens when we have 10 more (probably all Pixar) animated Best Picture nominees Beauty & The Beast’s status will be diminished.

Okay, so Beauty & The Beast’s nomination for Best Picture (along with the special award for Toy Story in 1995) probably paved the way for the 2001 introduction of the Best Animated Feature category but more than any of the other 9 films in this year’s Best Picture nominees (well, okay maybe District 9 and The Blind Side) Up feels like it wouldn’t be there without the expanded category.

After all The Incredibles didn’t make the Best Picture 5 when that category agve slots to the likes of Finding Neverland and Ray; Spirited Away didn’t make the 5 for Best Picture in a year that gave noms to The Hours and Gangs of New York, and was won by Chicago!; last year WALL-E didn’t make the Best Picture cut in a year when the category was filled by the underwhelming likes of Frost/Nixon, The Reader, Milk, Slumdog Millionaire and The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button.

The inclusion of an animated film in an expanded field of Best Picture nominees (much like a genre one for the likes of District 9) therefore feels like a consolation prize.

Until an animated film actually wins Best Picture or at least receives a Best Director nomination their inclusion seems both pointless and a de-valuation both of the category and that one film that made it to the heralded 5.

10 Best Pictures? Might boost the ratings but it seems a bad idea to me on reflection.