I thought it might be fun (okay, not fun) to do a quick check on the stats in the major categories to see how last year ended up lining up, going back to 2009, when the expanded ballot began.  The significant dates that I know of that dramatically changed the race were:

1943: Expanded ballot down to five in 1943.
2000: The BAFTA shifted its date to be before the Oscars in 2000
2003: The Academy rolled the Oscar ceremony back from late March to late February (except next year will be in early March).
2009: Expanded ballot from 5 to 10.
2011: The ballot was expanded from 5 to a random number between 5 and 10 (usually 9, sometimes 8).
2022: The ballot became an even 10.
2024: The Academy’s DEI mandate implemented.

How the membership changed. Thanks to Mark Johnson for laying this out:

Members added:
2011: 178  
2012: 176
2013: 276
2014: 27
2015: 322

“Then came the backlash. When all 20 acting nominees were white for the second year in a row in 2016, AMPAS accelerated its push for inclusivity:

2016: 683 new members (a record at the time)
2017: 774 (new record)
2018: 928 (highest ever)
2019: 842
2020: 819
2021: 395
2022: 397
2023: 398
2024: 487

Since 2015, the Academy has nearly doubled in size, growing from roughly 5,765 members to around 10,910. Among these new members, approximately 44.8% are women, and 36.4% are people of color.

Those are major changes that have impacted how the Academy has evolved over time.

There is another way to look at it. If you imagine how things shifted in Hollywood, that also makes a difference. For that, we should look at the annual box office. Right around 2003, just as the Academy was preparing to change its date, Big Hollywood exploded with IPs.

I trace this back to the rise of the Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings series. They showed a different way to deliver what audiences wanted – they would deliver sequels but they would be high quality sequels with known and beloved brands that whole generations had been raised to identify with. Take a look:

What is noticeable about this chart is how divergent with the Best Picture winner this list is. Back in the 1970s, on through the 1980s Best Picture winners were still big box office. But once Big Hollywood began making a lot of money on sequels and effects movies, the Oscars shrank. I call this Coach vs. the First Class section of the airplane. These are two totally separate worlds but are on the same plane. That’s what happened to the Oscars, too. 2003 marked a crossover. It wasn’t that Return of the King was number one, but it was close. That wouldn’t repeat at the Oscars until 2023, when Oppenheimer was one of the biggest money makers and Best Picture.

The-Numbers has all of the box office takes for Best Picture winners going back to 1964.

The box office didn’t matter because Big Hollywood was doing so well. The Oscars became a stamp of approval, like the salad at McDonald’s. It didn’t matter whether people bought it or not. That it existed at all proved McDonald’s cared about your health. The same went for Oscar movies. They just became their own little Fashion Week, but the rest of the public “at Marvel.”

These two Hollywoods more or less mirrored what would become two Americas. Needless to say, that would be shaken up with Trump in 2016, and then further in 2020 and now, it’s like we are at war. I’ve never lived through anything like what has become of Hollywood now, where all of it — even Big Hollywood — exists inside of an insular bubble that has no connection to the rest of the country where it used to be its beating heart.

Movies used to tie us together, but we don’t have that anymore. We have our own little universes on social media and streaming. I guess you could see it like a Big Bang, with humanities forming clusters. Who knows where all of this ends up?

The last major generational shift at the Oscars happened in the 1970s when the Baby Boomers smashed up against the Greatest Generation. The Jimmy Stewarts and the Bob Hopes mingled with the Warren Beattys and the Dustin Hoffmans. What we’re seeing now is that generation — the Boomers — on the way out with the Millennials (the new dominant generation) on the way in.

What do we know about millennials? They’re open-minded, tend to be world travelers, and are not traditionalists. I still think it’s a great time for the Academy to shrink Best Picture back down to five. It would help the industry. It would help the Oscars. It would make the Best Picture nominees matter and I’m guessing they don’t really matter now as almost no one even knows or remembers which ones were named.

The Best Picture winner or nominee should be the film that made the biggest impact on our entire culture — ideally. That would make them worthy of the title of Best Picture of the Year.  The trick for the Academy now is to break free from the “genre bias” that has held them back for decade after decade. Maybe with the new generation that might be possible.

I never thought I’d see the day when the Disney Mafia could not win in the Animated Feature department, yet that’s exactly what happened when the Academy began adding so many new members. So why should the actors still have such a strong hold on what wins? The actors, one might imagine, are the ones that get in the way of any other kind of film-winning except actor-driven movies.

I hope we can get back movies that everyone saw, remembered, and can quote even today. There aren’t movies like that anymore. But that’s partly due to the Two Hollywoods. The smaller, curated, hothouse flowers went to the tiny elite group that decides worth. That also floated into the realm of social justice.

But in the bigger Hollywood, where the movies everyone sees, it’s time to find a way to marry them. That’s what I’m hoping for, even if it doesn’t look like we have any chance of getting there. Once the festival season arrives, Fashion Week will be in full swing, the selection process will begin, and the whole game will restart.

This is why my Best Picture predictions will go big this year. So I will put Jon Chu and Wicked: For Good at the top, thinking that if the second one is as good as the first it will cash in big. No other film last year made as much of a cultural impact as Wicked did. It probably should have won and won easily if it had been a complete movie.

It is time to start considering how big a movie is, how much money it made and how many people saw it when determining what qualifies for Best Picture of the Year.

To that end, here are my Best Picture spitball nominations for this week:

Wicked For Good
Avatar: Fire and Ash
F1
The Roses
One Battle After Another
Marty Supreme
After the Hunt
Highest 2 Lowest
The Ballad of a Small Player
Frankenstein

And then:
Deliver Me From Nowhere

Untitled Kathryn Bigelow project
Hamnet
Jay Kelly
Michael
Elle McKay

This is just a rough list of the films I’m thinking about. No doubt, more titles will emerge after the summer. Hope you have a great weekend.