I concur with some of the suggestions already made: a Best Cast Award, a Best Voice Acting Award, and splitting the Best Picture Awards into genres (I’d like to see three - Drama, Comedy/Musical, and Action/Adventure/Thriller).
And the process for nominating documentaries and foreign films needs to be fixed.
Thank you, Ianzin, for the best StraightDope post I’ve read in a long time. Much enjoyed.
I would like to suggest that certain elements automatically disqualify a film from winning any Oscar. First cab off the rank would be any car chase scene over 2 seconds long.
I would love to see the acting categories separated into four groups of five, not separated by gender. Best Actor/Actress in a Starring Role, Best Actor/Actress in a Co-Lead Role, Best Actor/Actress in a Supporting Role, Best Actor/Actress in a Cameo/Ensemble Role.
This wouldn’t end category fraud (in fact it’d probably make it worse), but it would maybe solve problems like Sandra Bullock (who was probably in 80% of The Blind Side) competing against Meryl Streep (in maybe 45% of Julie & Julia), when Bullock should be facing Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart and Streep should be facing, I dunno, Morgan Freeman in Invictus. Using sex as a dividing line is pretty arbitrary, really.
Then again, I really doubt there are five worthy “cameo”-level roles every year. Maybe just three categories would suffice. Then again, thinking of this year’s Oscar race, I’d be nominating Justin Timberlake and Rooney Mara in The Social Network, Juliette Lewis in Conviction, Mila Kunis in Black Swan, and Marion Cotillard in Inception.
Hey, that wasn’t hard!
I’d also love a Best Actor/Actress in a Voice or CGI Role category. Ellen DeGeneres in Finding Nemo, Andy Serkis in LOTR, Zoe Saldana in Avatar…definitely some worthy work to award.
William Goldman once wrote that they should include Best Cast and Best Stunts and I agree. He wrote it before CGI and green screen “stunts” became the norm, but still, real stunts are a blend of art and technique and greatly impact a movie.
Most of the other stuff mentioned, they have the MTV Movie Awards for those.
I am still, to this day, amazed that they didn’t institute a “best motion capture performance” oscar after Any Serkis’ Gollum in The Two Towers (or at the very least, Return of the King). It could have been just an honorary award that time, but for the Academy to just ignore what an incredible achievement that was…
Most Blatant Vanity Project. Beyond the Sea, anyone?
Best Portrayal of British Royalty, just to stop them from hogging the Best Actress (and potentially Best Actor) awards. Colin Firth has probably already cleared and labelled the spot on his mantlepiece.
Most Gratuitous Product Placement. When’s the next Bond film out?
Best Straight-to-Video Release. We’ve got to give these people something to aspire to.
Best Fake Foreign Accent
Worst Fake Foreign Accent (a.k.a. The “Dick van Dyke”)
Best Goddamned Biopic, perhaps, so all the other movies get a chance to win something?
Best Costume Design in a Motion Picture Set After the 18th Century
This is a bit a of hijack, but this thread reminds me of something I always found very amusing.
Quite a few years ago I was watching Jeopardy. The category was “Hotel Names”. The clue was something like, “This Oscar category was given in the early years, but not anymore.”
The answer was: “What is ‘Best Western’?”
Best Monster, Creature, or Civilization-Toppling Disease.
This is actually a reference to the 1959 EMMY awards. MAVERICK won the award for Best Western, the only year this category existed.
Best Actor/Actress playing a real person
Best Actor/Actress playing fictional person
Best Animated Film not made by Pixar
Best Casting - There’s best editor, best director, best cinematographer, but no award for the best casting director, who has first credit after the actors in a movie credit sequence. Would have less to do with the actual acting in the movie (although it definitely helps) than with how well the people chosen for each role were suited for it and for each other. This came into my head by thinking about who you’d be giving the award to if you have a “best ensemble cast” award. Every other category either goes to someone specific for that person’s role, or to the producers for movies winning as a whole. Giving an Oscar to absolutely everyone in the cast would lead to seriously inflation of the “Oscar winner” title, already abused in the cases of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, and there’s already an award for best director.