Yesterday's announcement that next year's Academy Awards will feature 10 Best Picture nominees instead of 5 certainly put a jolt into a day that was otherwise light on entertainment news (unless philandering governors with valid passports count as "entertainment"), but now that the initial chorus of "who cares" and "oh I don't know, this could be cool" has subsided, it's probably worth taking a moment to consider the ramifications of the new Oscar reality.
First, the standard disclaimer: Yes, the Oscars are largely meaningless. Sometimes the winners are worthy, but most often actors and producers and directors are invited to the podium for reasons largely unrelated to their superiority. Still, it's fun to speculate each year on who might win and why, and there are some ways that the Oscars matter. The telecast and the hoopla surrounding it draws attention to some smaller films, and when done right, the show serves as a kind of advertisement for movies themselves. The conventional wisdom holds that the Academy is making this change in order to sneak a few more popular movies onto the show, which will give the general public more of a rooting interest, and thus perhaps bring the Oscar ratings back up to pre-cable-fragmentation levels. If this proves true, it could potentially bring a fresh set of eyeballs to some low-budget movies that could use the attention.
But if making the Oscars more viewer-friendly is the goal (and no one at the Academy has said as such, I hasten to add), then there are two ways the new Oscar order could backfire. First off, the extra five slots could easily end up being filled out by still more dreary middlebrow fare—or movies already nominated in the animation, documentary and foreign-language categories—instead of the big box office hits. Second off, the odds are likely to be stacked against the "extra" movies, which means viewers who tune in exclusively to root for Star Trek (or whatever) are bound to become as frustrated with the Academy as more art-minded movie buffs are every year.
Also, consider what adding more nominees might do to the voting patterns. One of the problems with the Oscars every year is that by the time the telecast rolls around, months of best-of lists and other award shows have led to a fair amount of fatigue with the recurring set of winners. In theory, giving the Academy members more choices might lead to upsets, since it'll allow the voters to veer away from the frontrunners everyone's already sick of. In actuality, what's more likely to happen is that all the dark horses will beat each other back, and the frontrunner will become even more of a foregone conclusion.