It's time for the Gurus of Gold to chime in...

Thoughts?

Circuit Round-Up, 06/26

* Last week, Mike Ward gave less than enthusiastic reviews of both Green Lantern and Mr. Popper’s Penguins.

* Luckily, Joey Magidson had a DVD Pick of the Week that he could really get behind.

* Anna Belickis spotlights Emma Hamer-whoops, I mean Emma Stone for this week’s Women in Cinema.

* Coinciding with Green Lantern is an Under the Circuit for Peter Sarsgaard, who I still maintain gave one of the most unjustly snubbed performances of the last ten years in Shattered Glass.

* I also previewed the Weekend Openings, and gave a surprisingly accurate prediction for Cars 2.

* Finally, Joey expresses his disagreement with the recent changes to the Academy’s rules regarding Best Picture nominations. Let us know your take on the news!

Another reason I'm not in favor of the new Academy rules for Best Picture voting...

...and it's similar to my previous issues, which will be documented in an article very soon (Clayton has the piece, it'll go up whenever he deems it appropriate). Here's Steve Pond at The Wrap breaking down the fact that a lot of voters won't have their ballots mean much for Best Picture:

A significant number of Best Picture ballots could end up essentially discarded as the result of the new Best Picture rules instituted by the Academy last week, TheWrap has discovered.

The Academy conceded that an increased number of ballots will no longer influence the slate of Best Picture nominees, but said its figures put the potential number of those ballots at less than 10 percent.

On the other hand, a simulation done by TheWrap (using critics' Top 10 lists rather than real Oscar ballots) shows the number of "unused" ballots topping 25 percent under the new rules.

The Academy changes the rules for Best Picture again!

We'll have more on this later, but for now I'll let the press release speak for itself:

Academy Builds Surprise Into Best Picture Rules

Beverly Hills, CA – The governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences voted on Tuesday (6/14) to add a new twist to the 2011 Best Picture competition, and a new element of surprise to its annual nominations announcement. The Board voted to institute a system that will now produce anywhere between five and 10 nominees in the category. That number won’t be announced until the Best Picture nominees themselves are revealed at the January nominations announcement.

“With the help of PricewaterhouseCoopers, we’ve been looking not just at what happened over the past two years, but at what would have happened if we had been selecting 10 nominees for the past 10 years,” explained Academy President Tom Sherak, who noted that it was retiring Academy executive director Bruce Davis who recommended the change first to Sherak and incoming CEO Dawn Hudson and then to the governors.

During the period studied, the average percentage of first place votes received by the top vote-getting movie was 20.5. After much analysis by Academy officials, it was determined that 5% of first place votes should be the minimum in order to receive a nomination, resulting in a slate of anywhere from five to 10 movies.

“In studying the data, what stood out was that Academy members had regularly shown a strong admiration for more than five movies,” said Davis. “A Best Picture nomination should be an indication of extraordinary merit. If there are only eight pictures that truly earn that honor in a given year, we shouldn’t feel an obligation to round out the number.”

If this system had been in effect from 2001 to 2008 (before the expansion to a slate of 10), there would have been years that yielded 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 nominees.

The final round of voting for Best Picture will continue to employ the preferential system, regardless of the number of nominees, to ensure that the winning picture has the endorsement of more than half of the voters.

Joey's year in advance Oscar predictions!

Taking a blind stab at next year's Oscar predictions...

It seems like the first thing we Oscar pundits do once the big night is over is begin to fret over next year. It’s a funny thing really, look at anyone’s predictions a year out and they’re bound to be horrifically wrong. For my part, just look at the 10 films I had predicted early on for the 2010 Oscars: Black Swan, Blue Valentine, The Fighter, Get Low, The Kids Are All Right, Love and Other Drugs, Shanghai, Shutter Island, The Social Network, and The Tree of Life. I wound up 4 out of 10, which isn’t bad, but none were the winner. I even managed to pick two that didn’t even come out (though one is going to be a big contender this year) in 2010! Obviously, it’s a fool’s errand, but what kind of prognosticator would I be if I didn’t press on anyhow? As such, I humbly present to you how I see the Oscar nominations going in a few of the big categories, with suitably clueless and half-hearted commentary to boot. This will be funny to look at this time next year, I promise. They always do…

Will the strong Box Office for Best Picture nominees lead to more Studio-funded adult dramas?

The Hollywood Reporter thinks that it might:

The King's Speech has jumped the $200 million mark worldwide. Black Swan and True Grit are right behind it. The Social Network got there in January, The Fighter has passed $100 million -- and the Oscars haven't even happened yet.

The stunning box-office performance of small awards films this season has rocked the conventional thinking in Hollywood, prompting many to speculate on whether studios will rush to release more adult dramas.

There was already evidence of the new detente at the Sundance Film Festival. As specialty films soared at the January box office, Fox Searchlight, Focus Features, the Weinstein Co. and Sony Pictures Classics were on a spending spree. Even Paramount, which hasn't been a major player since its specialty division Paramount Vantage was folded in 2008, partnered with Indian Paintbrush to pay $4 million for domestic rights to the small romance Like Crazy.

Just how much of an endurance test is the Best Picture race?

Variety goes on to tell us as much breaking down the road to a nod for each of the 10 nominees:

Now that the Oscar race for best picture is a 10-deep scenario, securing a spot in the nominees' circle is less about clawing one's way there than keeping a spotlight on the qualities that initially put a pic in contention.

"The Social Network" didn't need 500 million friends -- to quote its memorable ad language -- to land its spot, but instead a richer, media-friendly nexus of reviewer praise, solid box office, zeitgeisty controversy, a handful of creative names enjoying their biggest moment (Jesse Eisenberg, David Fincher, Aaron Sorkin) and rafts of awards, from critics' groups to the top Golden Globe prize. All it had to do was avoid an Academy-wide unfriending.

From the feel-good side of the aisle is "The King's Speech," a movie pegged as Oscar material from early on, delivering a beloved actor (Colin Firth) in full bloom raking in awards (SAG, Globe, critics' groups), an admired screenplay and that sometimes elusive intangible: audience uplift.

Well-received summer blockbusters like "Inception" and "Toy Story 3," meanwhile, repped the biggest brains and hearts, respectively, in today's studio system. Christopher Nolan's taut mind-bender gave Academy voters who snubbed his equally acclaimed "The Dark Knight" a chance to rectify that omission, while Pixar showed that its creative attention to a threequel merited extra recognition outside the animation category.

Entertainment Weekly goes over 10 times that Oscar missed with Best Picture...

There are certainly more than 10 examples to be found (and this feels like a wink and a nod to The Social Network likely coming up short this year), but here are the 10 that EW came up with, along with their reasoning:

10. Forrest Gump (1994)

You won't catch me quoting Mama in Forrest Gump and saying ''stupid is as stupid does.'' But jeepers, Bubba! While the Oscar went to a gumbo of a feel-good movie about a simple Alabama fella who runs real fast and shows up for all the key events in the late 20th century without paying attention, Academy voters missed the headline: Oscar-worthy Pulp Fiction had reinvented the language of American moviemaking, becoming an instant classic. It deserved the prize royale. —Lisa Schwarzbaum