See? The Academy Awards show is already shorter: Roger Corman, Lauren Bacall, Gordon Willis, John Calley get their honorary awards early

When Academy Awards planners announced the best picture nominee list would increase to 10 finalists, the response included doubts about an already long telecast getting longer.

Saturday night in L.A., Oscar planners made an unprecedented move to ensure that won't happen.

Rather than doing it onstage, the academy presented its four honorary Oscars -- always a time drag, no matter who gets them -- at a swanky banquet nearly four months before the actual show. This is the first time that has happened in 82 years. That's a lot of film clips and speechifying that won't clutter the telecast.

Winners included screen legend Lauren Bacall, the original filmmaking maverick Roger Corman, cinematographer Gordon Willis (The Godfather Trilogy, Annie Hall) and producer John Calley (The Da Vinci Code, Catch-22, The Remains of the Day).

You can find out a bit more about the winners in the links I've provided and the video clip posted above. If you watch until the end, you'll notice that its creator Richard Thomas isn't keen on the idea of shoving legends away from the TV exposure their careers deserve.

Scream if you're jonesing for an awards show; the horror, the horror

As much as I kid the MTV Movie Awards, Peoples Choice Awards and any other show allowing geeks to express artistic criticism in ways they'll be ashamed to admit in a few years, the fourth annual Scream 2009 awards for horror, fantasy and sci-fi flicks, presented by SpikeTV, are usually a hoot.

The show is being taped in Los Angeles this weekend, for broadcast on Oct. 27 at 10 p.m. on Spike.

Not only will the Scream awards pack 32 prizes into a 2-hour special -- take that, Oscar -- but they're more entertaining than a lot of the flicks they honor. A nice assortment of celebrities don't mind getting down and gory for a rabid crowd cheering dismemberment like it was the national anthem.

There's the usual best actor and actress prizes for each genre, and a thoroughly needless category for best sequel (wanna bet that New Moon wins next year?). You can see a quick rundown of the categories in the video clip above.

But three categories leap out like a cat from a closet in a 1980's slasher flick: scream song of the year, most memorable mutilation and "holy !@#$ scene of the year."

And those nominees are:

Scream song of the year: War Zone by Rob Zombie (Punisher: War Zone); New Divide by Linkin Park (Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen); Other Father's Song by They Might Be Giants (Coraline); Desolation Row by My Chemical Romance (Watchmen); Decode by Paramore (Twilight); and Bad Things by Jace Everett (True Blood).

Most memorable mutilation: the arm removal surgery from Splinter; arms cut off by rotary saw in Watchmen; the eyeball cake in Drag Me to Hell; head ripped apart by Nazi zombies in Dead Snow; the pendulum trap in Saw V; and the swimming pool scene in Let the Right One In.

Holy !@#$ scene of the year: the swimming pool scene in Let the Right One In; the subway crash in Knowing; the seance in Drag Me to Hell; space dive onto orbital ball in Star Trek; the destruction of Manhattan in Watchmen; and the Death Eaters attack London in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

Oscar trims some dead TV weight, and maybe an entire category in some years

Last week's decision by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to expand the best picture Oscar nominees list to 10 finalists isn't the only tweak intended to make the show more appealing to TV audiences.

From now on, all testimonial awards -- the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award and various honorary Oscars -- will be presented at a separate, black-tie event in November, rather than cluttering up the telecast with more introductory remarks, film clips and acceptance speeches. I'm guessing that about 12-15 minutes can be knocked off the running time right there.

The move may even bring back the Irving Thalberg Award for a producer's lifetime achievements, which hasn't been presented since 2001, presumably to trim the telecast program a bit.

At the same time, another decision to revamp the voting procedure for the best original song Oscar could shorten the telecast even more -- and possibly eliminate the category altogether in certain years.

The academy's music branch selects the nominees by rating eligible songs on a scale of 6 to 10. Under the new rule, if no eligible song earns an 8.25 overall average there won't be a best song competition. If only one song reaches that 8.25 average, it will be nominated along with only the next-highest rated song.

Therefore, a year could have as few as two best song nominees (three was the previous minimum) and no more than five finalists (which has been the case for decades). But that still doesn't explain how Bruce Springsteen (The Wrestler) and none of Eddie Vedder's songs from Into the Wild were nominated in recent years.

For that answer, check out Variety's story about the academy's latest game of musical chairs.

 

Academy Awards will expand to 10 best picture nominees in 2010

Get ready to make those Academy Awards betting pools a bit longer in 2010.

Wednesday afternoon, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences president Sid Ganis announced in a Beverly Hills news conference that next year's field of best picture nominees will double in size to 10 finalists, for the first time since 1943.

"After more than six decades, the Academy is returning to some of its earlier roots, when a wider field competed for the top award of the year," Ganis said, according to Variety.com. "The final outcome, of course, will be the same -- one best picture winner -- but the race to the finish line will feature 10, not just five, great movies from 2009."

The last time the Oscars included 10 best picture finalists was 1943 when Casablanca won over a field including For Whom the Bell Tolls, Heaven Can Wait, In Which We Serve, Madame Curie, The Human Comedy, The More the Merrier, The Ox-Bow Incident, The Song of Bernadette and Watch on the Rhine..

The change is another sign that the academy is concerned about fading ratings for its annual Oscars telecast, amid complaints that voters are out of touch with mainstream movie tastes. The academy already shifted 2010's presentation date to March 7, two weeks later than this year, to avoid head-to-head competition for viewers with the Winter Olympics.

Nobody can predict whether those extra slots will be filled by movies that the general public embraced at the box office, or five more esoteric films that mainstream audiences generally haven't seen.

Complaints from mainstream moviegoers resurfaced when the No. 2 grosser of all time, The Dark Knight ($533.3 million domestic), wasn't among 2008's best picture finalists, despite receiving some of the year's best reviews. WALL-E ($223.8 million) was pegged by many as a best picture finalist but missed the cut, settling for the best animated feature Oscar, which doesn't carry the posterity of a best picture Academy Award.

Among 2008's five best picture nominees, only Slumdog Millionaire sold more than $100 million in tickets, and much of that box office haul occurred after winning the Oscar. It's final domestic box office total of $141.3 million dwarfed the earnings of three other nominees combined (Milk, Frost/Nixon and The Reader).

Ratings for last February's telecast were 6 percent higher than 2008's broadcast -- Hugh Jackman hosting and Heath Ledger's posthumous win for best supporting actor in The Dark Knight obviously made a difference. But 2008's show was the lowest-rated Oscars telecast ever, so an uptick could be expected.

The Golden Globes, sponsored by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, annually nominates 10 movies for two best picture prizes, divided between dramas and musical/comedy.