Also in 2020 moving up ceremony to early Feb.
No more info on what they mean by popular film. Maybe fans will vote?
I doubt that fans will be involved in selecting the film. Perhaps nominations will be limited to the films with the biggest ticket sales?
I wonder what this would have meant for past winners and nominees. Would Titanic have been nominated for this instead of Best Picture? And all three of the Lord of the Rings movies had Best Picture nominations, but only the third won. Would they have been pushed into this category? And will this award not quite have the same prestige as Best Picture?
“A new category is being designed around achievement in popular film”
This could be anything - and would these films also be eligible for Best Picture? One thing I doubt that it will be, however, is fan-voted; it would no longer really be an Academy Award if it was.
“We’ve set an earlier airdate for 2020: mark your calendars for February 9”
The first thing that came to my head was, this is another attempt to try to get separation between the Oscars and the Golden Globes, presumably by having the nominating ballot deadline be before the Globes ceremony. However, the article says that it’s just for 2020, and the 2021 ceremony will be at the end of February, so I wonder why they’re doing it.
“We’re planning a more globally accessible, three-hour telecast”
It sounds like they’re taking some of the “who cares” categories, giving them out during the commercials, then, when they come back from commercial, show the winner being announced and probably five seconds or so from the speech. This is pretty much how every non-acting award is shown at the Creative Arts Emmys broadcast.
Another reason they might be doing this: so ABC can air a repeat of the ceremony at 8 PM Pacific, to get more people to watch.
as expected the elitist crowd is already all ticked off by the new category.
They might allow the studio to pick which category to put a film in, regular or popular . Pretty sure now they pick which category an actor/actress competes in - lead or supporting role. Or is that just for Emmys?
I doubt it would have changed too terribly much for Titanic, but I feel Lord of the Rings would all have been in here and probably won. As for prestige, it will definitely not have the same prestige as Best Picture. This is essentially a People’s Choice Award on steroids. The closest equivalent I can think of is when they created the animation category. Sure, Beauty and Beast was up for best picture THEN, but now it would just be the “Latest Pixar Movie Memorial Best Animated Film” Winner.
You know how sports create rules because a player did something and all the fans end up calling it the “(player) rule”? Can we just call this “The Black Panther Rule?”
Like most things, this is a decent idea that has a successful path and a non-successful path, and I can just guarantee the academy will eff it up somehow.
For this to successfully work, and the easiest method would be to take the top 20 highest grossing films and allow the academy to pick 4 or 5 or whatever of them and vote on which is the best picture of those. This would give “the people” the enjoyment of seeing a movie they probably saw and enjoyed in theaters win an award while also giving the academy the opportunity to still give an award to a good film instead of what was just the highest-grossing.
But, no, they’ll probably find some way to still give the award to some arthouse indy whatever.
It’s just an excuse not to nominate Black Panther for Best Picture.
I can see this category getting call the kids table.
Just rename it the “Best Marvel Superhero Movie” category.
I’m surprised since after they doubled the nominees, I predicted they would start the process of adding more “Best” categories, but guessed they would first add something akin to “Best Art Film”, to claw back some credibility from European and Independent film festivals.
I still predict Oscar’s current goal is to have multiple “Best” categories to have the awards move towards the format used by the Westminster Kennel Club to judge dogs, or whatever the equivalent conformation show is for, you know, ponies.
That has nothing to do with it, as the new category won’t appear until the 2020 Academy Awards, for films released during 2019.
there are so many awards now I can’t keep up with them . I think the season starts in Jan and goes to Dec. 
Wasn’t the Golden Globes sort of a joke until they put the ceremony on TV? Very few people vote on those awards.
Ah. Then we’ll see if Black Panther gets nominated next year.
Hmmm…I wonder if 3/1/2020 being Super Tuesday has something to do with it… :dubious:
Maybe it’s an excuse to give it some kind of an award. 
Unlikely, since 3/1/2020 will not be any kind of Tuesday.
I’m not a fan of the new category; sorry if most movie viewers are looking for Marvel superheroes and not creative writing/filmmaking, but I’d prefer integrity to pandering in the Oscars.
-
They really only care about ratings. Wow, way to take you profession seriously there folks.
-
The big problem is not that lesser known films are winning. It’s the crappy, boring production of the whole show.
Terrible “jokes”, pointless and boring musical numbers (not counting the best song performances in this category). Etc.
I don’t see anything at all about the proposed changes that would change at all how boring the thing is. Esp. in an Internet age where you can just skip watching the show and click a link to find out who won.
I watched the documentary Get Bruce years ago about supposed funny man Bruce Vilanch. It was painful watching stars struggling to find something nice to say about a very unfunny person who is the epitome of bad Oscar broadcast writers. It’s one of those “the emperor has no clothes” situations.
Compare to The Golden Globes which is a joke of an organization. Why is this a thing at all? OTOH, they sometimes actually put together a somewhat interesting show.
As long as the Oscars continues to have people at the level of Vilanch write the show, it will suck. The nominated films, categories, etc. are not going to change that at all.
Most of the money that the AMPAS gets is from ABC, for the broadcast rights. So of course they care about the ratings, because ABC’s not going to pay much for a show that no one watches.
The announcement doesn’t say when the Popular Film category will start, it only says that the date changes in 2020. I don’t know if they implemented this to get Black Panther an award, but it seems possible. And also something that could backfire if BP got that award but not nominated for the main one, it would seem like a consolation prize.
Since they didn’t specify anything on how the Popular Film category would work, and people are just speculating, maybe they are deciding how to implement it based on what people are yelling about. It’s definitely a bid to get higher ratings, but I’d be surprised if that works much.
It is pretty much the “throw it a bone” award. A chance to give an award to a film that deals with the current cause de jour even if the film itself is a bit crap.
It’ll probably cause more arguments and controversy than it stops.
Maybe its sequel, Black Panthest.