Upping the best picture shortlist from five to 10 is a sop to the studios. Art has nothing to do with it

So the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has changed its rules: this year there will be not five nominees for best picture, but 10. In making the change, they hark back to 1939, when there were 10 nominees in this category: Gone With the Wind (the winner); Dark Victory; Goodbye, Mr Chips; Love Affair; Mr Smith Goes to Washington; Ninotchka; Of Mice and Men; Stagecoach; The Wizard of Oz and Wuthering Heights. Sid Ganis, the eternally popular president of the academy, spreads out his hands and asks, wouldn’t it be nice to get back to that sort of quality? Indeed it would, and Ganis added that many people regretted that The Dark Knight (a very successful film) was not a nominee for best picture last year.

So let’s try to cut through the spin. The academy and the world have borne up bravely under the unpleasant truth that often our best films do not get nominated as best picture – here’s a quick 10: Rear Window, The Lady Eve, His Girl Friday, Psycho, Letter from an Unknown Woman, Some Like It Hot, The Shop Around the Corner, The Searchers, Blue Velvet, Laura. So nobody knows nothing – and everybody lives with it.

Now, there are real fears at the academy. The old guard of Hollywood – still called the studios, though that’s a weird term – is miffed that its pictures have had little recognition in recent years. Instead, the 6,000 or so academy members have been nominating American films made outside the mainstream – films that are called “independents”, though that word is now as tinny as “studios”. But the academy is running scared because fewer people watch the Oscars show if the nominated pictures are lightly supported by the public. In the year of No County for Old Men and There Will Be Blood, for instance, it was felt that the “best” pictures had been seen by very few people – and this slippage was measured in the viewing figures for Oscar night.

So Ganis reported that ABC (the network that has the Oscar night agreement with the academy) was very happy about doubling up the nominees – so long as it doesn’t mean 10 independent pictures. He should add that the academy depends for its year-round operations on the income from that one night. So it’s the academy that is most relieved, because if recent viewing trends persist it might have to fold or give up the idea that the Oscars are a vital part of the American experience.

We all know the truth – the awards are no longer central. The movie culture of 1939 was enormously different from the one that functions today. Any loyal filmgoer knows that the notion that “Hollywood” now can produce 10 pictures a year remotely deserving of “best” (except for best scam) is a travesty. The academy might just as well permit productions to buy their way into the Oscars – it will probably come to that one day. Meanwhile, the proposition that smaller, tougher, braver films may be the best we can do comes under increasing threat.

Ganis says he’s interested in art. But he is driven by commerce and money – he is, I should add, a delightful and entertaining man, and a friend to boot. But the boot is what this new scheme deserves and is bound to get. Why stop at 10? Why not have 10 nominees in every category? – the actors would like that, and may deserve it. Why not have 10 top songs? Why not nominate everyone in the end so there are no hurt feelings? Of course, the Oscar show – at that reckoning – may last three days, and I have sneaking suspicions that that is not what ABC is interested in. The real destiny of the Oscars show points another way – towards American Idol. In that case it may be all the easier to see, in time, that our best pictures have often got through life without a statuette.