And Then There Were Ten – The Media by Us

And Then There Were Ten: 2008, The Indie Wildcard

And Then There Were Ten – in which our intrepid hero goes back and expands the Academy Award Best Picture nominations to ten nominations, and goes about filling those hypothetical slots. This time – it’s 2008. Check out previous entries here.

Chapter 5: Indie Movies in our Temples of Gloom (A Wildcard Throw-Down)

https://i0.wp.com/images.complex.com/complex/image/upload/c_limit,w_680/fl_lossy,pg_1,q_auto/fwdvtzdbme5pucjz6zoq.jpg?resize=620%2C400 — INDIE MOVIES… BEING SO…. INDIE. (image: Complex)

And it comes down to this.

The last magical slot for expanding nominations in 2008.

If the rest of the movies previously assigned to the extra Best Picture slots are playoff division winners (Box Office Division, Acting Division, Animated Division and Comedy Division), then this last slot is the wildcard play-in game.

Looking at guild support, all the usual suspects have already made it: Frost/Nixon, Milk, Slumdog Millionaire and Benji B all wrapped all four major guild nominations (Producer, Director, Ensemble Acting, Writing). The other two with more than one guild nominations are The Dark Knight (DGA, PGA, WGA) and Doubt (SAG, WGA) which made the extra slots as described in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 of this speculative manifesto. All that’s left are the WGA nominees, but this guild is a poor predictor for nomination success (43% correlation of WGA nomination to Best Picture nomination). This leads us down an appropriate avenue – the wildcard movie in the wildcard slot.

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And Then There Were Ten: 2008, The Quote-Unquote Comedy

Chapter 4: The Quote-Unquote Comedy (A Three-Way Throwdown)

https://i0.wp.com/i.onionstatic.com/avclub/5274/07/16x9/960.jpg?resize=840%2C473 — It Happened One Night (1934) – first Best Picture comedy (image: AV Club)

The “Comedy.” If you’re even reading this multi-post treatise of speculative Oscarology, then you’re probably already aware that comedies generally get little respect in this arena. Since the successful days of comedy/musicals in the 1950s, nominations are hard to come by and wins are harder still for comedies. 2008 is no slouch in this judgment, with zero comedies nominated for BP – the funniest of the bunch is probably Slumdog Millionaire, but one would be hard pressed to consider that a chuckle fest – aside from the poo scene – poo is funny.

In this self-celebration of seriousness, comedies are ranked as less significant than traditional dramas. Why do they get less love in this respect than their other genre compatriots? I don’t know yet – so, an analysis of the nomination statistics is in order. And later on, I’ll create my own Sadness Index to figure out a winner.

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And Then There Were Ten: 2008, The Animated Exception

Chapter 3: The Pixar Touch of Gold (WALL*E)

http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/pixar/images/c/ce/Wall-E_Cubecolors.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20090615011459 — WALL*E, our unconventional hero (image: Pixar Wiki)

Since the days of Steamboat Willie to the CGI movies of today, very few films have received top recognition in a Best Picture nomination. But the medium has also changed considerably during this time period. It’s hard to imagine the complicated and super-sad Anomalisa up against the bright songs of The Land Before Time, also super-sad in its own right. There are the children’s singalongs, hand-drawn for Disney from yesteryear, and there are the emotionally-wrought, complex and funny character studies that Pixar makes today for Disney.

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And Then There Were Ten: 2008, The Actors’ Showcase

Chapter 2: Actors Acting for Acting Actors (Doubt)

https://i0.wp.com/fanart.tv/fanart/movies/14359/moviebackground/doubt-503ba42b5a4f5.jpg?resize=840%2C473&ssl=1 — Streep, Amy, and Hoffman on their debut EP cover art (image: fanart.tv)

The Actors’ showcase is a great way for a film to get its foot in the Academy door. More than that, an actor-friendly film is an established pathway to not just multiple acting nominations, but typically a Best Picture nomination as well. The Academy has only about 6,000 members – nearly a fourth of the members are actors. It is not a stretch to posit that Academy members are capable and even pre-dispositioned to recognize its own department as the key to an exceptional film. Our beloved statistics bear this out as well.

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And Then There Were Ten: 2008, The Box Office Hero

Chapter 1: The Box Office Hero the Academy Deserves, Not the One It Needs Right Now (The Dark Knight)

This candidate is my entire reason for coming up with this series. And many believe that this candidate missing out is the reason for the expansion. If you want to drive ratings for the broadcast ceremony, you want to select a movie that people have seen – and seen again – to the tune of over a billion in global box office. That would be nice. It also helps when a well-known movie is good.

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And Then There Were Ten – Expanding the Best Picture Nominees in 2008

Introduction: Why We Care

The Academy Awards. Where white people are finally recognized.

The Academy Awards holds a special place for many people – for some, it is a celebration of cinema, competition and glamour, with warm, family-time memories spent watching tuxedos and sparkling dresses exchange gold statues. For others, it is a backslapping, near-masturbatory, never-ending, annual slog about movies that you do not care about. And for a select portion of the population – it is an afterthought.

For years now, a cottage industry (which is an understatement – more like a mansion industry) has cropped up around prognosticating who gets what on the big night. For the awards nerds out there, the cinema equivalent of the Super Bowl is Oscar Nomination Day. The saying goes, it is an honor to be nominated – and there is truth to that. There are those among us who know when Nomination Day is coming up, and make plans to tune in the live webcast of the announcements early in the morning.

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