And Then There Were Ten – in which our intrepid hero goes back and expands the Academy Award Best Picture nominations to ten nominations, and goes about filling those hypothetical slots. This time – it’s 2008. Check out previous entries here.
Chapter 5: Indie Movies in our Temples of Gloom (A Wildcard Throw-Down)
And it comes down to this.
The last magical slot for expanding nominations in 2008.
If the rest of the movies previously assigned to the extra Best Picture slots are playoff division winners (Box Office Division, Acting Division, Animated Division and Comedy Division), then this last slot is the wildcard play-in game.
Looking at guild support, all the usual suspects have already made it: Frost/Nixon, Milk, Slumdog Millionaire and Benji B all wrapped all four major guild nominations (Producer, Director, Ensemble Acting, Writing). The other two with more than one guild nominations are The Dark Knight (DGA, PGA, WGA) and Doubt (SAG, WGA) which made the extra slots as described in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 of this speculative manifesto. All that’s left are the WGA nominees, but this guild is a poor predictor for nomination success (43% correlation of WGA nomination to Best Picture nomination). This leads us down an appropriate avenue – the wildcard movie in the wildcard slot.
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