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Today, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced its intention to double the size of the best picture field for next year's Oscar race, from five movies to 10, for the first time since Casablanca won the award in 1943. In addition to ensuring that our national conversation about the Oscars now begins in frigging June, this move opens up the best picture field to movies outside the usual narrowly defined scope of high-minded Oscar-worthiness. It's uplifting to imagine that some of the newly created spots might go to the kind of smaller movie that usually goes under the Academy's radar for the big prize (something like, say, last year's Rachel Getting Married, or even a foreign film like Let the Right One In) but the likely outcome (and, no doubt, the Academy's intention) will be to make the Oscars more, not less, commercial. The expanded field will allow for the recognition of animated fare like Wall-E or popular summer blockbusters like The Dark Knight (neither of which made the best picture list last year.) This year, movies that may benefit from the roomier category include Star Trek, Up, and (if there's a just God somewhere) Drag Me to Hell.
This shift will also mean that at least a few of the best picture nominees will be likely to be movies most people have seen. (Let's face it, the great There Will Be Blood/No Country for Old Men faceoff of 2007 was thrilling for us film nerds but baffling to the average Oscar viewer.) The Big Money's Chadwick Matlin makes the point that the 10-movie field may also serve as a kind of Hollywood stimulus package, encouraging studios to spend more money on marketing, audiences to flock to more movies, and TV advertisers to buy more Oscar ad time based on expectations of higher ratings. But there are yet-unforeseen consequences of this shift: The opening song medley and the clip reel of best picture excerpts will both have to double in length, pushing Oscar-night bedtimes (and critics' deadlines) ever closer to the break of dawn.