Five Ways to Make the Academy Awards Better

Tonight will be another long Oscar night with most of those watching unfamiliar with many of the titles up for nominations. Here are five suggestions for improving the Oscar Telecast and making the awards more relevant.

1.Add an award for Best Ensemble Cast- The Critics Choice Awards and the People's Choice Awards already honor Best Ensemble Cast and its time for the Academy Awards to do so also. This would be a very popular category because people would like to celebrate the collaborative effort of actors. Awarding actors for something other than their individual achievement will encourage them to be more selfless in their selection of roles and will lead to better movies. Everybody wins.

2.Beef up the Animation Category-According to the Oscars website, there are only three nominees in the Best Animated Film Category. Somehow being the winner of a category of three doesn't seem to be very dramatic. The Academy needs to either find two more films to honor or get rid of this category.

3.Shorten the ceremony-Every year efforts are made to make the Academy Awards shorter, but it is still too long. In a world of short attention-spans where people can instantly get Oscar results on the internet, they are not willing to wait around if things start to drag.

In order to placate those who wish for more extensive coverage, certain things can be made available online. For example, the Academy Award nominated songs whose performances have been cut should be made available in their entirety at the Oscars website.

4. Have more diversity in movie release dates-Not all movies are crap, it just sometimes seems that way. Hollywood spends 10 months of the year releasing garbage and then puts out all of its quality movies in a two month window so that they can qualify for the Oscars and then get an Oscar 'bounce'. There has to be a better strategy. There has to be a way to encourage the studios to scatter the release dates of quality movies so that the movie-going public actually gets quality choices throughout the year. This would greatly improve the image of the movie industry and give quality movies a chance to find their audience without being overlooked in a pool of all the other Oscar contenders.

5.Make the Short Documentary Nominees more widely available-I'd imagine that all 5 nominees for best short documentary were compelling stories, but I'll probably never know, because it is so hard to track down all these documentaries to watch. If they were packaged together and shown, surely there would be people who would go out and watch them. The viewing time to watch all 5 of the nominees would be close to that of a long feature film. Magnolia Pictures releases both the Oscar nominated movies in the Short Animation and Short Live Action categories, according to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, but it doesn't appear that the Short Documentary films are neither released together Theatrically nor on DVD. It's hard to get excited about a category in which 99% of the viewing audience has not had an opportunity to see the movies.

Postscript-I started writing this before tonight's broadcast and put the finishing touches on it after the broadcast. While I still propose all of the above recommendations, I will say that I was pleasantly surprised by the ceremony. It didn't appear to drag on nearly as long as in past years and it seemed to have less fluff and instead it became more of a celebration of movies. That said, my five suggestions would make both the ceremony and the movie industry even better.

http://www.bfca.org/ccawards/2008.php
http://www.pcavote.com/pca/show/nominees/
http://www.oscars.org/awards/81academyawards/nominees.html
http://www.startribune.com/entertainment/movies/39873592.html?elr=KArksi8cyaiUo8cyaiUiD3aPc:_Yyc:aUU