Even Kathy Bates's acting muscle can't hold up that many plasmas. Image: Sweded.

Excitement is reaching a pitch close enough to elevate heart-rates slightly, with the Oscars mere days away. Up for Best Picture are Up and Up In The Air, and for the first time in six decades, eight more films: Avatar, A Serious Man, Precious, District 9, An Education, The Hurt Locker, The Blind Side and Inglourious Basterds.

The question is why? Obviously, many butter-soft entertainment-journalist hands have been wrung about this year’s expansion of the Best Picture category to include ten nominees. It has also been noted that the five-nominees-for-every-category rule might be common, but was certainly never set in stone.

The first Academy Awards, covering 1927 and 1928, didn’t have a Best Picture category at all but split the “best” into ‘commercial’ and ‘artistic’ – Wings won for Most Outstanding Production and Sunrise won for Most Artistic Quality Of Production. The Academy reminds us that there were ten nominees for Best Picture for nine of the early years, winding up with 1943’s Casablanca win. There were eight nominees in 1931 and 1932, and 12 in 1934 and 1935.

So let’s look to the Academy for its own explanation. Academy President Sid Ganis said, “Having ten Best Picture nominees is going to allow Academy voters to recognize and include some of the fantastic movies that often show up in the other Oscar categories, but have been squeezed out of the race for the top prize.”

It has been suggested that the choice to ‘honour’ ten films in 2010 was due to last year’s outcry over popular films — The Dark Knight (too blockbustery), Wall-E (too pixelly), Tropic Thunder (too jokey) and Iron Man (too flip) — being ignored for more worthy fare like The Reader and Milk. Although there has been a cavalcade of commentators thinking that expanding the list is a travesty.

The Week assembled the whiners and their complaints, from Michael Medved of CNN wondering if everyone has seen all ten to Jim Slotek of The Toronto Sun still griping about the lack of comedies to Jack Matthews of Moviefone and Jim Caple of ESPN suggesting that its yet another example of the dumbing down of culture (Caple actually making the bizarro-world suggestion that it’s only a matter of time before Michael “Ka-Boom! Boobies!” Bay gets a nod).

NPR went the opposite route, suggesting that the widening of the field should have happened far earlier, specifically in 1962, which might’ve included such classics as Lawrence of Arabia, The Longest Day, The Music Man, Mutiny on the Bounty, To Kill A Mockingbird, The Manchurian Candidate, Birdman of Alcatraz, Days of Wine and Roses, The Miracle Worker, Long Day’s Journey into Night, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, Billy Budd, Divorce Italian Style, Last Year at Marienbad, Gypsy, Sweet Bird of Youth, Period of Adjustment, Jules and Jim, Lolita, Advise and Consent, Peeping Tom and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. That’s a 22-film list.

It’s not just 1962 and 2009. Other movies to miss out on a Best Picture nomination include: Metropolis, King Kong, Duck Soup, The Big Sleep, The Third Man, Singin’ In The Rain, Rear Window, North By Northwest, Psycho, Vertigo, The Birds, (notice an anti-Hitchcock pattern here?), Breakfast At Tiffany’s, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, Brazil (notice an anti-science fiction strain?), Full Metal Jacket, Miller’s Crossing, Thelma & Louise, Sling Blade, Trainspotting, Amistad, The Truman Show, Magnolia, Requiem For A Dream, Amelie, Memento, The Passion Of The Christ, Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind (notice an anti-Kaufman vibe?), Walk The Line, Dreamgirls, Pan’s Labyrinth, American Gangster, The Wrestler and, obviously, many other less artful or successful films.

1973 was particularly bad, with Last Tango In Paris, Mean Streets, Serpico, The Long Goodbye, and Paper Moon not nominated (The Sting won), and 1995 saw Dead Man Walking, Leaving Las Vegas, The Usual Suspects and Nixon snubbed (Braveheart won).

So why are they expanding now? We doubt (Doubt was also not nominated for Best Picture) that it has to do with an unusually strong field. There’s no hope in hell that District 9, The Blind Side, An Education or A Serious Man will win. Besides, the Academy Awards have a long history of nominating individual performances, costumes, directors, and special effects in place of adding to the Best Picture tally, and that has made sense so far.

We suggest that it’s a trade-off between the Academy and the studios. The big studios get to apply the gold man logo to the posters and DVD covers of more films, which will hopefully convince more brains to put more bums on seats and couches. In turn, the Academy lets commercially as well as artistically successful films share the big stage, hopefully to boost flagging ratings.

We’d say making better films might do more good than slapping a “Nominated for Best Picture” on The Blind Side’s newspaper adverts. But with the likelihood of Avatar giving James Cameron another “King Of The World” crown to add to the almost $2.5 billion in receipts, that probably won’t help either.