Should the Oscars Go Back to Having Five Best Picture Nominees?

It was in 2009 that the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences expanded the final list of nominations for Best Picture from the five that have been the norm here (as in just about every category) since the second ceremony way back in 1928 to ten nominations (as they refrained from expanding the number of nominations in the other categories in anything like such a fashion).

The rationale for this doubling of the number of nominees was apparently to broaden that list beyond the movies actually likely to win such an award (as plausibly deserving candidates for the Big Prize), to include movies that are actually popular--and in the age of the blockbuster's decadence, ever less likely to be anything describable as high cinematic art--so as to help shore up what was already evidently a shaky public interest in the ceremony.

Stated that way it sounds a very dubious stratagem. After all, we all know that if they throw, for example, Top Gun 2 a bone in the Best Picture category that movie's producers are almost certainly not going to be taking that little statue home--and even if there was a chance of their doing so I am not sure that would make fans of the movie watch the four hour ceremony in anticipation of The Big Moment. And unsurprisingly interest in the ceremony has, on the whole, continued to weaken, all as the debasement of the Best Picture nomination by such gestures (and the whiff of desperation about them) cannot possibly have helped the prestige of nomination for the award, or the ceremony.

Does that mean that the Academy is likely to cut the list of nominations down from ten to five? That is what one would expect if the overriding concern was the perceived integrity of the award--but it isn't. Even with the value of an Oscar win, never mind nomination, ever less certain, there being more nominees is attractive to marketing-minded producers and career-minded artists, and these ever ready to make trouble when they do not get recognition (admittedly, out of sheer desperation given the ugly, ugly nature of the business). The result is that their having expanded the number of Best Picture nominees for each to ten a decade and a half ago, and this decision having stood without any opposition ever since, I expect that it would be easier to picture it expanded yet again to fifteen nominations as against its being cut back to five.