Table Scraps: And The Nominees Are…

Press Release From The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences: 

Los Angeles, CA – January 2, 2012 – The Academy has not yet announced how many Best Picture Nominees there will be for this year’s Oscars because, simply, we haven’t made up our minds.

One thing is certain; there will not be ten again.  Ten was…well, it was just reckless. It became evident with the release of a shocking statistic regarding last year’s Oscar broadcast: a 450% rise in the number of pencils people jabbed into their eyes by the time the last best picture nominee was presented.  Details of the statistic show that the pencils were, in fact, jabbed into their eyes in response to the number of best picture nominees and not, as first thought, in reaction to James Franco and Anne Hathaway’s spirit-crushing awkwardness (for that, there was a 700% increase in voluntary check-ins into psychiatric hospitals in the week following the broadcast).

So, there definitely will not be ten best picture nominees.  In that case, we’d like to apologize in advance to this year’s equivalents of Toy Story 3 and Winter’s Bone, movies that will, unfortunately for them and fortunately for the sanity of Americans, be left off the list.

For nearly 81 of the past 83 Oscar ceremonies, there have been five best picture nominees.  But that seems like too few.  Right?  Seriously, we’re asking you.  We’re at a total loss for what to do.  There are just so many movies being made nowadays.  With the rise of art house theaters and the wider distribution of smaller, indie films, we would never hear the end of it for all the films we left off the list if we only nominated five.

Though it has become clear in recent years that no matter what films we nominate, a tsunami of dissent will flood the internet.  And no, we are not referring to the notoriously “snubbed” film of 1996, the Tom Sizemore political/action thriller, Tsunami of Dissent.

So, what are we thinking?  Six and nine are out of the question, because they’re just weird numbers and both too close to five and ten, respectively.  That leaves seven or eight nominees for this year’s Best Picture.  Let’s face it, that’s pretty much the difference between The Tree of Life or no The Tree of Life.  Am I right?  And is anyone going to be really broken up if that piece of work isn’t included?

We know that no matter what we decide, thousands of angry blogs will be written and furiously pretentious comments will be made all over every site where you can write those little comments at the ends of articles and things.  Is there a way to disable those?  For like, all sites that could potentially mention the Oscars?  Please let us know if there’s a way to do this.  We just kind of don’t want to hear it.

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