The Nolan Effect: This is an article written by Mark Harris on how the changing rule of Best Picture to 10 (albeit a temporary one) and then to the confusing between 5 and 10 (somehow it always ended up 9, wonder why) actually reduced the overall number of nominated pictures, especially in the top 8 categories (Picture, Director, 4 Acting, 2 Screenplay). Because the possibility of getting nominated in Best Picture is getting higher, everyone is campaigning. The result of it? The lazy voters will only remember the big posters they saw or the screeners on their tables. These paragraphs contain the key points:
To understand why, it helps to abandon any preconceived notion you might have of Academy voters as people who sit around all year with nothing much to do but see every possible contender and then make their voting decisions calmly and with time to spare. Yes, some of the voting members are elderly Los Angeles–based retirees who have all the time in the world to attend Academy screenings and yell at Martin Scorsese, but the majority are working professionals who, like the rest of us, can’t usually see everything they want to see and, unlike the rest of us, have to see everything by a deadline (this year, voting closed on January 8) that is a full month earlier than it used to be.
That means prioritizing — a nice word for tossing a whole bunch of movies aside. It also means relying increasingly on cues from well-funded Oscar campaigns. When only five Best Picture nominees were allowed, the field of likely contenders usually narrowed by December to seven or eight. For members of the actors branch, who also have to vote for 20 acting nominees, or of the writers branch, who have to pick 10 writing nominees, that meant that in order to fill out their ballots, they had to look beyond the Best Picture candidates and turn their attention to a large pool of additional movies. But since the rule change, 14 or 15 films annually harbor hopes of a Best Picture nomination. There’s some truth to the old saw about the psychology of voting that people like to vote for winners, and they also prefer not to waste their time on candidates that they hear don’t stand a chance. I suspect that the practical effect of a larger Best Picture field is that AMPAS voters now tend to divide the 50-odd DVD screeners they receive into two piles: Movies they “should” see (in other words, the big contenders) and everything else. Guess how often the second pile never gets looked at until it’s too late?
Best Actress and Best Picture have the least overlap: Out of the four acting categories, Best Actress had the least overlap with Best Picture. Why? According to this article, best female roles usually appear in indie / small-scale flicks that can't compete with those big-scale studio movies with big campaigning budget.
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