A couple of articles popped up this week crying for the end of the expanded Best Picture field at the Academy Awards, I’m not convinced.

Mark Harris at Grantland and Jen Chaney at The Dissolve are the writers calling for the conservative roll back of the Oscar’s big prize and both of them discuss a wide variety of issues with the Oscars, but neither makes a very strong case that ten Best Picture nominees are the problem. They both make points that show some many issues outside the number of Best Picture nominees, yet they still lay blame on the expanded field.

Using Harris and Chaney’s articles we can find more effective places to try and make changes, as well as looking at a big argument they missed, the influence of the Oscar prognosticators themselves.

Let’s start with Harris, who was driven to write his article after it was revealed that the Oscar’s big categories yielded the smallest number of nominated films to date:

“This year’s major-category nominations — 44 in all — were spread among just 12 films. (The only non–Best Picture nominees to receive any major category recognition this year were August: Osage County, Blue Jasmine, and Before Midnight.)

That’s the fewest in 30 years. What’s more, the second-lowest number of films represented in the major nominations in the last 30 years — 14 — happened just one year ago.”

Harris’ cause for concern is more than warranted, he just doesn’t make a solid case that the expanded nominees are the problem. In the paragraph immediately following the previous excerpt, Harris probably lays out the best defense that the number of nominees isn’t the problem:

“In a good year for the Oscars, voters reach out toward a wide variety of deserving pictures, directors, performances, and scripts, choosing to herald outstanding work even when it’s in a movie that has little chance of becoming a Best Picture nominee. The greater the number of films that are embraced, the clearer it becomes that voters have done their homework.”

Maybe the voters aren’t living up to their responsibility, maybe that is the problem. When 2013 is being heralded as the best year of film in almost 15 years (1999 being the next closest challenger) not only is it up to the voters to spread the love around, but they should have plenty of incentive to look past just the heavily campaigned titles.

Harris goes on to argue that the expanded field is forcing busy voters to prioritize and this in turn leads them to just stick to watching the 15 or so Best Picture candidates. With a smaller Best Picture field of only five nominees, they have to watch more movies to fill out all the categories. This makes sense, but again, why are we being so sympathetic to the voters who can’t be bothered to see a couple extra movies and not just lazily pick from the field they are “supposed” to pick from. The Academy should, undoubtedly, try to celebrate as many films as possible and if they aren’t willing to adapt to the changes, or try a little harder, that is a voter problem, not a nominee one.

“Two other factors only exacerbate the problem. The first is the backloaded release calendar. This year, all nine of the eventual Best Picture nominees opened in the fourth quarter; last year, eight out of nine did.”

Again, how is this a nominee problem? If the fourth quarter alone is producing 8-10 movies that are worthy of the Best Picture prize isn’t that a signal that the voters, again, are just getting lazy and not looking very hard? Harris, sort of, gets into this:

“When good movies drift into theaters more gradually — as they did two years ago, when three Best Picture nominees opened before Labor Day — a wider array of films get assessed. But when all the big ones stack up at the finish line, as they did this year, voter viewing tends to happen as an act of triage — save the worthy, kill the rest — right as other awards are being handed out. And those other, heavily repetitive ceremonies tend to reinforce a narrative of inevitability that pushes borderline movies even further to the margins.”

Here Harris actually gets to what might be the biggest problem, the “narrative.”

There are months of awards handed out that build that narrative and the Academy voters, for some reason, seem to just fall in line. Exasperating this problem even further is the fact that for months before they ever give out an award every major film site has people predicting what the Oscar nominations will be. Some insane people will even start the prediction process the Monday after the Oscars.

Predicting how the voters might think can be a fun game, but we are underestimating the growing influence of that prediction narrative. In the five years since the field was expanded, social media and the internet’s influence have grown immensely in the film world. The months of predicting what might happen, almost always focused on those fourth quarter potentials, lets voters ignore everything that isn’t predicted to be there at the end. It is a weird phenomenon, the prognosticators are trying to predict how the Oscar voters will vote and in turn might be influencing the vote more than they imagine (or the prognosticators secretly know this and love it).

Why not focus on the films that have come out and try and keep those in the spotlight? Instead of months of predicting that so and so are going to be great in a movie nobody will see for months, why not keep the focus on films from earlier in the year that are worthy of nominations. Sure, we saw people cheering on James Franco for a short while, Before Midnight was adored, Short Term 12 earned best of year raves, but there were only the faintest of whispers for these films and their stars come nomination time. Why not continue to support the efforts of films like Frances Ha, In a World, Upstream Color, Stoker, Blue Jasmine, Stories We Tell or Mud?

People are so concerned with finding reasons as to why earlier released films don’t fit the Oscar narrative, we need more people trying to gather support for these outsiders and helping them into that narrative. Who cares how close you get to predicting the nominee fields? Shouldn’t we just celebrate the year in film as it comes and not worry about the films we think we might want to celebrate? The narrative is being forced into a box instead of trying to build as big a box as possible.

Harris has different ideas as to what the biggest problem might actually be, and funny enough it isn’t the nominees:

“Which leads to perhaps the biggest problem: the campaigns themselves. Many people reflexively equate Oscar campaigns with “buying awards”; that’s glib, but if you were to say “buying nominations,” you’d be uncomfortably close to the truth. It’s not actual nominations that are being purchased, but awareness — it costs a great deal of money for a distributor to keep a movie in the pool of widely discussed contenders during the last three months of the year. The bills that pile up aren’t just for the For Your Consideration print ads and the expenditure of sending out thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of DVDs, but for the hotel, transportation, support staff, per diem, and amenity costs of shuttling your talent from one event on the circuit to another.”

I’m not going to disagree there.

Harris points out plenty of problems with the Oscar system, but he does a poor job of defending his thesis. His article didn’t convince me that the number of nominees is the issue, it convinced me that the narrative and the voters are.

Jen Chaney approached the five nominee angle from a slightly different one than Harris because he swooped in and stole her article idea. Chaney’s approach was five additional points to be added to the discussion, but again, it all comes across as this conservative mindset that just doesn’t like change.

I’ll approach Chaney’s points one by one in the order she does.

“1. The wild-card approach still doesn’t capture all the deserving nominees—or always allow for Dark Knights to be included in the mix.“

There are two parts to this point, but right off the bat we aren’t making a lot of sense. Making an argument that the expanded field doesn’t catch all the deserving nominees as a reason to retract the number of opportunities for said deserving nominees is completely counterintuitive. Chaney also doesn’t bother to defend that part of her point, instead her focus falls firmly on the lack of blockbuster nominees.

I’m not concerned about blockbusters making the field unless they are also one of the best pictures of the year, and every year since the expansion there have been deserving blockbuster films, some have been nominated. Chaney does hit the nail on the head as to why the blockbuster has been underserved:

“Open-minded Academy voters—the kind willing to consider a wide variety of genres and filmmaking approaches, not to mention sit through a lot of screeners—are what make that happen.”

Again, a voter issue, not a nominations one.

Chaney ends this section with this quote:

“Reducing the Best Picture options back to five…would make the race more competitive, though, and therefore more compelling. ”

There is no evidence to support this claim and it is willfully ignorant of the idea of competition. The more competitors there are they greater the competition. Chaney’s desire for five nominees, like Harris, seems to be driven simply by preference/opinion. Neither has any position they can strongly defend proving ten nominees as the main issue for the reduced overall field.

“2. The expansion of the Best Picture field was supposed to improve the ratings for the Oscar broadcast. It hasn’t.”

I understand one of the arguments for expanding the field was to maybe boost the ratings of the show, who cares. Expanding the field should further help celebrate the year in film and provide a more accurate range of what the best films of the year were. Yes, these articles were written in response to a diminished field of contenders, so the expansion of celebration hasn’t happened yet, but both writers make clear that the expanded Best Picture field isn’t the problem.

The sample size is also quite small to be judging the expansion as a failure for ratings and Chaney makes the point that the Oscar’s ratings basically swing between a 5 million viewer range every year, regardless. So if it is not hurting or helping, then there is no harm in just keeping it at ten.

“3. The wild-card Best Picture approach was supposed to make the race more surprising. It hasn’t. ”

The narrative is the real issue here and the lack of surprise must be course corrected from somewhere else. Writers like Chaney and Harris should be leading the charge on breaking down those barriers, not trying to blame the expanded Best Picture category.

Chaney actually makes a great point as to why there is no surprise, and guess what, it isn’t the nominees, again:

“…the true barrier to genuine Oscar surprise is the fact that so many award shows—the Golden Globes, the Critics’ Choice Awards, the SAGs—are broadcast on national television before the Academy even gets its turn in the E! GlamCam sun. By then, even casual observers have a pretty solid sense of who is going to win, and may even be able to accurately predict, within a sentence or two, what those winners will say in their acceptance speeches.”

Chaney unfortunately loses me shortly after that comment:

“…perhaps the Oscars can again differentiate itself by going selective and ultra-niche.”

Why is there such an obsession to make things smaller? How is the Academy supposed to support its community by narrowing the focus of films it chooses to celebrate? Especially when the nominees are selected by a group of voters who we already can’t trust to “get it right.” Also, “selective and ultra-niche,” isn’t this article supposed to be about getting the Academy to support a higher number of films?

“4. Spreading the Best Picture love to more movies will result in box-office bumps for films that deserve to be seen. Except it hasn’t. ”

It would be great if more money was made at the box office by the Oscar nominated films, but most of the films don’t have a real opportunity to do so because they often aren’t out in wide release any more. Plus, I can almost guarantee that these films are being seen more than they would have, either at home or in the theater, than if they hadn’t been nominated. That is a win for the filmmakers and the industry. And again, how is this an argument to reduce the number films that are celebrated?

“5. Having more Best Picture nominees dilutes the prestige of the Best Picture award.”

This is Chaney’s opinion, she is entitled to have it, but how is the prestige diluted by when a winner beats a wider field of great films. That makes the award mean something more to me. The winner beating out eight other films means the voters have more opportunities to get behind a film they really love the most. Voters are less likely to be voting for a film just because it is the best of the five that were nominated and have a greater chance of voting for their true favorites with a field of 9-10. And for anyone who says there isn’t a strong ten or so films every year to celebrate in the Best Picture field is delusional, and really should rethink why they are watching movies.

Chaney’s arguments to her final point are the most egregious.

“A slate of five is more concise, which is perfect for our 140-character culture. It makes a stronger statement about what exactly the best is. It’s much easier to remember for those of us who have to discuss the Oscars on radio and TV shows. Which, as we all know, is what really matters here. It demands careful consideration of what’s for your consideration.”

Again with the limiting language. Chaney might be joking, but why should fans of a medium that demands 90 minutes to three hours of your time be sympathetic to the 140-character culture. It’s not making a stronger statement, it’s making an easier one.

Maybe I am crazy for being happy with ten nominees, maybe I just don’t understand the system, but Harris and Chaney both make some excellent points as to how we can make the Oscars better; I just don’t think they make the case for five Best Picture nominees being one of them.