After two years of nominating 10 different movies for their coveted Best Picture award, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has voted to change the way in which nominees are selected. While it's always been nice that so many films got the boost that came with Best Picture nomination, the problem, of course, is that when you open up the field that much you sometimes end up handing out nominations to films like Precious: Based on the Novel "Push" by Sapphire and Up in the Air.
The somewhat complicated solution that the Academy has settled on is stipulating that in order to receive a nomination, a film must earn at least 5% first place votes, ensuring that movies don't slip in by being everyone's next-best option. This move leaves open the possibility of there being 10 Best Picture nominees, but also prevents the Academy from having to fill out the ranks in case of a particularly lean year.
So many very bad, very serious things happened to her - it HAS to be good, right?
The Academy has also agreed on a number of other changes to their process. For instance, there is now no need for the Animated Feature catagory to be "activated," but it still requires a minimum number of eligible releases in order to be competitive, and the number of possible nominees is now tied to the number of eligible releases. Also notable is the change to the Documentary category, which that category's eligibility window now matched to the rest of the categories', meaning that for this year only, the window is longer than 12 months. Interestingly, however, none of these adjustments will help you get through the awards show's sixth hour.
For the full, extremely wordy version of this announcement, head on over to Deadline.
