The Academy has created a new Oscar for next year: “Achievement in Popular Film.” The point of the prize, apparently, is to give the awards a chance to recognize hit movies without having to nominate them in the Best Picture category, something which will either make Mr. Oscar look like a cooler guy or make him seem like even more of an unbearable snob.

This means that those people saying “Hey, you know what, Black Panther should win an Oscar this year” are probably going to get their wish, but not perhaps in the way they may have wanted. It also means that the chances of a film that isn’t some low budget indie that most people haven’t seen winning the biggest prize of the night have more or less gone out the window. Had this award existed for previous ceremonies, it is possible that films like Gravity and Mad Max: Fury Road wouldn’t have been nominated for Best Picture due to their “popular” status.

There’s more as well: in an effort to keep things “shorter,” many awards will be given out during commercial breaks, which probably makes more sense than cutting back on the seven or eight ten-minute tributes of the evening (seriously, though, kidding aside, it doesn’t feel at all fair to the winners). And there will probably still be a lot of Trump jokes.

Source: The Wrap