"Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what's going to work.
The Oscars show, ever since the decision last fall to expand the best-picture field to 10 movies, was overtly put together as a summer blockbuster.
The Hollywood parochialism that habitually characterizes the best-picture field — "Slumdog Millionaire" being a partial exception this year — is refreshingly absent from the shorts.
Now in the final stages of post-production, Muhammad's Childhood is viewed with deep cynicism by many in the Iranian motion picture field.
When the best picture field was expanded to 10 last year, "Up," the adventure story about a crotchety old man and his young, balloon-toting charge, became a best picture contender.
An apotheosis of sorts came two years ago, when the big Oscar duel was between "There Will Be Blood" and "No Country for Old Men," standouts in a best picture field that had, by most estimates, the lowest aggregate box office gross ever.
The traditional solution is to mark the beginning of each take with a "clapper," or "clapstick," a set of wooden jaws about a foot long, snapped together in the picture field.
They're all going to be able to say, 'I worked on a film that was nominated.' " Still, the expansion of the best picture field is unlikely to solve problems in the Oscar process.
The current ruler of the cartoon universe, Pixar, started out in the short form, and the company has kept up that tradition even as its features have conquered the box office and made inroads into the best picture field.
The expanded best-picture field meant more cocktail parties, and there was little holding back the flow of Champagne, unlike the last two years when a threatened actors' strike and then the global recession made the bacchanal take on a more somber tone (at least publicly).
