3 Ways To Spruce Up The Oscars

A few key changes to the voting process and to the awards ceremony itself will make for more credible results and — yes, please! — a shorter, more entertaining broadcast.

- Scott Feinberg

On Feb. 26, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will put on the 89th Academy Awards, and nobody is more excited for the event than I am. But as the Oscars’ biggest fan, I also know there are several fairly obvious and easy ways in which the Academy can and should improve the Oscars ahead of its milestone 90th edition in 2018. It is in this spirit that I publicly submit three of them.

Make the Academy’s membership list public, but require all campaign outreach to go through the Academy Want to know who the roughly 7,000 members of the Academy are? Tough luck. The organization never has made its full membership list public (although in recent years it has disclosed the names of new invitees), ostensibly because it doesn’t want members to be bombarded with campaign materials — but that’s preposterous.

Most members already are bombarded — and quite happily, as they enjoy a screener as much as anyone — because distributors annually pay a small fortune to one of a handful of publicists who have painstakingly compiled lists that are more or less complete and then rent out their services for any outreach the distributors wish to make.