Wednesday 24 June 2009

Hollywood Babble On & On #311: Double Your Pleasure, Double Your Fun, Double Your Bullshit Tolerance

Just when you think the Academy Awards have lost all credibility, they start slipping into the negative zone.

In case you haven't heard, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences have doubled the number of Best Picture nominees from the traditional 5 to 10.

10 nominees.

What the hell?

Of course the official reason for this incredibly dumb-ass move is that the studios want some of the more mainstream fare to have a chance over the actor-friendly, overly serious, pseudo-sincere melodramas, mostly released by studio's pseudo-indie divisions for the last few years.

However, Hollywood is the land of unintended consequences and there are going to be plenty with this decision.

Because when you double the number of Best Picture nominees you're going to:

1. Double the chances for Harvey Weinstein to be obnoxious while wasting millions of investor's money in the vain hope of getting another Oscar.

2. Double the number of tedious movie star vanity projects.

3. End Sean Penn's leave of absence from movie-making immediately, because it doubles his chances of justifying his existence.

4. Double the amount of screener DVDs filling landfills across Southern California.

5. Double the run time of the awards ceremony and halving the audience. (Which pretty much puts it down to two quadriplegics who caregiver left the TV remote out of reach.)

6. Completely ruining of the nice configuration of 5 TV monitors at the nomination press conference. No more 2 on each side, one over the announcer's head, now they're going to be stacking them like cord-wood.

7. Double the odds of a Miley Cyrus film getting a best picture nomination.

8. Double the chances of the Best Picture presenter getting lost reading the nominees, and starting all over again.

9. Double the chances of a Michael Bay film getting a nomination.

10. Doubling the odds of voters just saying "fuck it," and tossing their ballots.

10 nominees, 10 unintended consequences.

What a coincidence.

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