Variety

And the winner is... well, actually there are lots of winners with the decision to broaden the best-picture Oscar race to 10 films.

The board's decision to double the category to 10 nominees "may make it more interesting and less cloistered," said Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences president Sid Ganis at a press conference Wednesday morning.

Ganis speculated that the longer list could include a documentary, foreign-lingo film, animated feature and, he deadpanned, "maybe even a comedy."

The expansion to 10 slots increases the chances of films in those three categories, which have long been eligible for best picture bids but may have missed out because they have their own categories, as some Oscar voters have said in the past. And indie films gain, because there's more room for "little" movies.

The other big winners could be the TV audience -- and, by extension, the Academy -- if the expanded list includes more populist fare. And it can't hurt that more films will be in line for a potential Oscar bump at the box office.

What's more, one Academy member in the know predicted that this change is just the first in Oscar's world.

Ganis' "less cloistered" observation was a deftly phrased acknowledgment that the org has been charged in recent years with being elitist in some of its choices. After the 2008 nominations came out, many media pundits, industry workers and film fans bemoaned the omission of such crowd-pleasing films as "The Dark Knight" and "Wall-E."

Conventional wisdom says that when well-known films are nominated, such as "Titanic" or "The Lord of the Rings," ratings for the Oscarcast rise. As for answers to other questions being asked around town Wednesday:

The foreign-language, feature doc and feature toon races will not be affected.

The nomination ballot will have space for 10 entries instead of five. That's the only change, and the awards schedule will remain the same, since PricewaterhouseCoopers won't need more time to count ballots.

Academy execs said they don't feel the move will add significantly to the running time of the show, and the idea of cutting some categories from the telecast didn't even come up.

No other categories -- such as director -- will be expanded to 10 nominees.

One awards pundit said the move makes the director race the one to watch, since it's still five slots and could be a better indicator of the favorites. (However, it's rare when the five director nominees exactly mirror the picture race.)

On Wednesday, many kudos vets were surprised but positive about the change. A few had qualms: The Academy will need more seats for more nominees, and the additional best picture clips could add to the ceremony's running time. A few skeptics worried that the voters may have to scrounge around to come up with 10 worthy films (unlikely, since about 300 films qualify annually).

And one pundit said that with 10 nominees, a picture could win with only 11 percent of the vote.

That's absolutely true. But a close race among 10 films is unlikely, and in the past, with five movies, there always seemed to be two or three front-runners. (The PWC accountants are too discreet to ever reveal how close or lopsided some of the races have been.)

Asked whether "Dark Knight" was a factor in the move, Ganis said that many titles were mentioned in the post-mortem, including that one.

"We've been mulling what we can do to make everything more valid," Ganis said.

Though the move sounds radical, Ganis began his remarks at the confab by saying that the Academy is returning to an old tradition -- a fact emphasized by two posters flanking him that gave the titles of the 10 best-picture contenders for 1939. The titles showed the breadth of choices, including "Gone With the Wind," "Love Affair," "Stagecoach" and "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington."

The Academy had 10 picture nominees between 1931 and 1943.

Every year, an AMPAS awards committee does a post-mortem on lessons learned from the recent show. Ganis said this year's Oscarcast producers Bill Condon and Laurence Mark suggested to the committee that it would be great if "the spectrum was wider" for best-picture contenders. Ganis said some at the Academy had been thinking the same thing, invoking the '39 race. (The org is currently doing a tribute to those 10 contenders.)

It's likely that Academy honchos were particularly receptive to Mark and Condon's ideas since they came in the wake of their show, which changed the DNA of the Oscarcast by jettisoning many old traditions -- which resulted in a positive reaction and improved ratings. And those changes opened up a lot of possibilities elsewhere.

Acad exec director Bruce Davis said Wednesday that the awards-review committee was enthused by the expansion of the best picture nominees. There were no dissenting votes at the board meeting held recently, Davis said.

"LEVI JOHNSTON (the father of Bristol Palin's baby boy Tripp) is a very interesting person who has been thrown under the bus," says Rex Lamont Butler, the Anchorage attorney who has befriended the young Alaskan, so much in the news.

Levi, ousted from the Palin inner circle, barely seeing his baby boy and unable to work at anything but bear hunting because of his Palin post-election notoriety, is presented as a nice guy by writer John Jeremiah Sullivan in the July issue of GQ magazine. He is depicted as a diamond in the rough, seriously homophobic, but a young stud done wrong by circumstance.

IF YOU don't have access to GQ and if the Palin story is still fascinating to you, just try a few of reporter Sullivan's quotes herein. He describes Wasilla like so, "It is a shithole surrounded by such loveliness. ... You can feel the Palins. From my budget hotel on Lake Lucille, I can see the big wooden wall that surrounds their house and a roof beyond it. They are of this place, they belong here, but their power has disturbed an equilibrium. At the gun shop, where the owners have known the family forever, the men at the counter say they believe deep down that when she puts her head on her pillow at night, she (Sarah Palin) wishes she had never said yes to McCain. It's a remark made with some sadness, sure. ... She is a great American frontier story. Maybe that was as hard for you as it was for me to see, when we were so busy hoping she would win or lose. But the historical demi-urge that spoke through Sarah Palin is one that has cyclically made and remade this country. ... Levi is a mushroom growing in the shadow of that story."

Reporter Sullivan is a patient, good reporter who can really write. And GQ's editors gave him his head in creating the various ideas and details of this amazing article, written while he toughed it out waiting for an interview in Alaska. I urge you to put your hands on the entire thing and read it from the beginning.

Sullivan writes that there are two takes on the Bristol-Levi story in Alaska: "One was the 'under the bus narrative,' held by the Levi camp ... Levi loves girl, she gets pregnant, he gives up high school and hockey so he can provide for her and the baby. When it suits their political purposes, the family embraces him and essentially puts him forward as a son-in-law. When his meager political value is spent, they do what most normal parents would do and discourage the daughter from marrying him, in hopes she can get back on with her future. He's frozen out of the family."

SULLIVAN also implies that the drug bust of Levi's mother simply "follows a recognizable course of small-town values." Was she set up by the Secret Service and busted for selling "a handful of OxyContin?" Your sympathy shifts to Levi and his mom. But you need to read the entire article in GQ and draw your own conclusion. The reporter asks Levi if it pisses him off that he changed his whole life and now they've shut him out. "He put down his glass of Coca-Cola and said, 'Yes.'"

LOOKING AT the July GQ, which boasts what the magazine calls "our first nude cover," one is struck by the beauty of a nakedly posed Sacha Baron Cohen. He has been polished, powdered, shaved and made up to resemble the gay Austrian fashionista who is his own latest satirical invention, Bruno. (Serious gay people won't appreciate this absurd character but others will relish the joke being played on a subculture.)

If Levi Johnston of the Sarah Palin story is as homophobic as his reporter says he is, this cover couldn't make the brave young bear hunter happy, because there he is, between the same covers with a swishy Sacha.

INCIDENTALLY, Austria isn't particularly happy with Sacha's movie and his character as a fashion pundit who makes dim Nazi jokes. Sacha says his latest movie invention is a gay blade who, "wants to be the most famous Austrian since Hitler." This makes Austrians furious.

Some say Sacha made up his latest character based on the true-life TV personality Alfons Haider of "Strictly Come Dancing." Says Haider: "I'm Austrian. I'm gay and I work for television but the rest is fiction. ... I am also not as feminine as Bruno is in the film. ... But Sacha Baron Cohen is a wonderful comedian. He's very powerful."

You may recall seeing Haider on TV, playing the German husband of Coco Chanel in the recent Lifetime TV movie that Shirley MacLaine did about the designer's life. "I played a Nazi with a heart," says Haider.

I suppose we could ask the good people of Kazakhstan if they have actually suffered a loss of identity from Sacha's first groundbreaking film: "Borat." We'll see if the Austrians suffer the same.

ONE OF the nicest women in show business -- Farrah Fawcett -- has left us. She was my Texas friend and we shared a Feb. 2 birthday that kept us in touch with one another. I well remember how this dear girl, who became an iconic "Charlie's Angel" sensation with her good looks and great hair, always remained devoted to her family and worried about their welfare. We never had a conversation that didn't lead back to her parents!

When she more than fulfilled promises most people didn't even believe she could keep, nobody was more thrilled than I was. (She was Emmy and Golden Globe nominated multiple times for dramatic performances in "The Burning Bed," "Extremities," "Between Two Women" and "Small Sacrifices," and perhaps her greatest role -- heiress Barbara Hutton in "Poor Little Rich Girl.")

I want to thank her longtime lover Ryan O'Neal for the way he stood by when she needed him most.

So long, little birthday Aquarian, sleep easy.

(E-mail Liz Smith at MES3838@aol.com, or write to her c/o Tribune Media Services, 2225 Kenmore Ave., Suite 114, Buffalo, NY 14207.)