Stewball wrote:there shouldn't be a separate category for director, and further, that the director should receive the award instead of the producer, whose function is vital (financing, thus the hundreds of produces listed per title in the credits nowadays), but the director is ultimately responsible for all aspects of a film's content.
That's a good point. I've always thought it was weird when a film is nominated for Best Picture, but the director isn't nominated. I'd probably just keep it the way it is though tbh - makes the director and producer both feel important independent of each other. The Oscars as a whole really needs a major overhaul though, because they're outdated - people are tired of them doing the same old thing.
Here's what I'd do:
1. Have a single presenter who's naturally funny present all of the awards. The 'have two famous people read out half of a prepared script each' for every award is embarrassingly cheesy.
2. Show more clips from the nominated movies and performances, and ply everyone with lots of booze to loosen them all up, then see what they say when they win. Let them talk for a bit if they want.
3. Remove the Best Foreign Film category. I thought about this quite a bit, and I actually came to the conclusion that including that category smacks of tokenism, and rather than being more inclusive of films outside their own realm all it really does is add to the notion that the Academy are the ultimate arbiters of taste in all things film. The fact is that they're generally not interested in foreign films and they're not versed in films outside their own culture so why have them judge foreign films at all?*
*The Best Foreign Film category is handy though. It generates a list of 1 film per country that that country considers to be the best they produced during the year, so there is that.
I'd drop a couple of superfluous categories and transfer a few technical awards over to the other Oscar ceremony nobody watches that awards all the tech guys. This would drastically shorten the length of the ceremony too and make it much more viewer friendly, because let's face it who's waiting with bated breath to see which bunch of nerds won for Best Sound Mixing? Why these are included in the main ceremony and not the tech Oscars is a mystery to me. So here are the categories I'd keep in the main ceremony:
Film
Director
Actor
Actress
Supporting Actor
Supporting Actress
Original Screenplay
Adapted Screenplay
Score
Cinematography
Film Editing
Production Design
Costume Design
Animated Feature
Animated Short
Documentary Feature
Documentary Short
Which means Foreign Film, Makeup & Hairstyling and Song would be dropped and Visual Effects, Sound Editing and Sound Mixing would be transferred over to the tech ceremony.
I'm assuming the Criticker forums are monitored closely by many Academy members and officials, so I'll expect to see these changes implemented in 2017 now that I've alerted them.