How the Academy Awards Need to Change

Side Bar: How the Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts, and Sciences Needs to Change
Sidebar Dedicated to: George E. P. IV of Cleveland, OH

In seeing King Kong (2005) for the second time and being forced to remember that it was not nominated for Best Picture, I decided to take some time and write about an idea I had a long, long time ago in relation to the award for Best Picture by the AMPAS—you know the Oscar® people. Many years ago, I was furious that E.T. the Extraterrestrial lost out to Gandhi. I thought it just wasn’t fair. How do you compare these two movies? Really, everybody knew that E.T. was the best movie of the year, and Gandhi was the best Epic Film of the year. How is E.T. supposed to compete with Gandhi? Now, I think the Foreign Press Golden Globe® Awards have it closer to right when they split the films into two categories (Drama and Comedy/Musical). I just disagree with the two categories. I don’t see how comedies and musicals are in the same category. I would prefer they had stuck with Drama and Comedy and then if the film was a dramatic musical like Rent, it could be in the Drama category or a comedy like The Producers, it could be in the Comedy category. Closer, yes, but still not just right. No, I think just right would be to divide the Best Picture Award into two categories: Epic (defined as a film that is grand-scale and lavishly produced usually with a theme of an historic nature or a grand fantasy nature as to seem of historical relevance) and Classic (defined as a film that tells a story brilliantly confined to it’s time frame that does not venture far into historical themes and is of a more reasonable scope and vision).

With this change, there could be 10 nominated films. Ah hah…top ten lists rejoice! Though, of course, the number of epic released in a given year might not reach five. The award would be cancelled if there were not, at least, three worthy nominees. In the end, there would be two Best Pictures.

Under this change, this is how the nominations could have looked for last year…

(note: titles in color are linked to their reviews)

Best Picture Epic:

• King Kong purchase (Special Edition) [DVD]
• Munich
• Memoirs of a Geisha purchase [DVD]
• The New World purchase [DVD]
• Pride and Prejudice purchase (Widescreen Version) [DVD]

Best Picture Classic:

• Brokeback Mountain purchase (Widescreen Version) [DVD]
• Crash purchase (Director's Cut) [DVD]
• Good Night, and Good Luck. purchase [DVD]
• Batman Begins purchase [DVD]
• The Prizewinner of Definace, Ohio

Now, I don’t know about you, but I like the look of these two lists. It pits movies of the same depth together. It allows for the recognition of 5 additional films that otherwise get little. It makes comparisons between apples vs apples and oranges vs. oranges. It would give hope to filmmakers who know they don’t have the resources to make films of such a grand nature as the $207 million King Kong.