7 Weeks To *Oscar: Hoping For The Best

The best we can hope for from this event is...

People will watch more of the nominees. Not Academy viewers, 80% of whom will be 80% of the way to completion (aside from docs, international, and shorts) when the nominations are announced, but real life people.

That's really it.

If real people are paying attention to the movies that get nominated, they might watch the show wreck to come, which is important to The Academy, which will, for what it's worth, run an Oscar show for a 10-month year in 2022.

Of course, as illogical as that is (as was expanding the window through February this year for what turned out to be zero reasons), the natural progression of Oscar tends to block out any movie that opens before March anyway. So... maybe no harm, no foul there. (And if you are feeling your defense of the handful of movies that qualified late this year... they would have pushed back to a December window if the rules hadn't been changed, so please release your pearls.)

I would be truly thrilled by…