Interrupting My Favorite Movie Makers List for Some Offseason Oscar News

Big news today, which you may have already heard. The Oscar's are going back to the OG format of nominating ten films for Best Picture rather than the now standard five. The Academy had previously been nominating ten films from 1934-1945.

Personally, I'm in favour of this decision. While it will slightly diminish the prestige of being named a Best Picture nominee (if the academy hasn't already done that with their consistently terrible selections), it will give the academy five more chances to give deserving films some credit. Hopefully this will help avoid debacles like in 1961 when they overlooked Psycho, or 1981 when they overlooked The Empire Strikes Back, or 1990 when they overlooked Do the Right Thing, or just this year when they overlooked both The Dark Knight and The Wrestler. The list goes on and on -- and here's a list to prove it!

These films were NOT nominated for best picture:

Malcolm X
The Wild Bunch
2001: A Space Odyssey
Requiem for a Dream
Mean Streets
Scarface (both versions)
Boyz n the Hood
Paths of Glory
Once Upon a Time in the West
The Manchurian Candidate (OG version)
King Kong (OG version)
Vertigo
Blade Runner
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Cool Hand Luke
The Day the Earth Stood Still
Heat
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
Alien
Casino
Glory
The Public Enemy
Rear Window
The Searchers
Return of the Jedi
The Third Man
White Heat
The Untouchables
Being John Malkovich
North by Northwest

And this list doesn't even include the hundreds of foreign masterpieces the Academy snubbed. So hopefully this move to ten nominees will help avoid any more travesties like these.

On the flip side, however, this now gives the Academy an additional five chances to nominate completely undeserving films. I mean with only five picks they still managed to nominate Gladiator, Chicago, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Erin Brockovich, and The Towering Inferno. I can't wait to see what crap they manage to pick when they have to fill ten slots.

I have a strange relationship with the Oscars. While, I think they are total BS and they consistently get 80% of everything wrong, from who should be nominated, to who should host, to who should win lifetime achievement, to how it is produced. They make me SO DAMN ANGRY!! At the same time though, I love it. I never miss a show and I eagerly await it every year. The night before the nominations are announced I can barely sleep I'm so excited, and I hurry to the computer to check them as soon as I wake up. Then for the next month or so, leading up to the show, I attempt to watch every film nominated. I'm also always looking over Oscar history, checking who got nominated, who won, etc. They're Hollywood's top awards, so how could I not obsess over them?

OK, now I'll be getting back to my list of favorite filmmakers, so check back soon for number nine on the list.