By Noah Redfield, Staff Writer

It’s official: The Academy Awards have had a breakdown.

2010 will forever be the year when the Academy Awards opened up the Best Picture playing field and allowed five more prestige pictures to the party, a move that was supposed to reach out to more populist fare in order to get the ever-important ratings up. Ironically, the watershed release of “Avatar” makes the decision somewhat pointless since it’s been a shoo-in from the beginning.

Nevertheless, the gang of 10 is a truly diverse collection of mainstream hits (“Up,” “The Blind Side,” “Inglorious Basterds,” and “District 9”) and arthouse sleepers (“The Hurt Locker,” “A Serious Man,” “An Education,” “Precious.”)

Whether the experiment pays off is anyone’s guess, but one thing is for sure: We have a proper race on our hands. Whereas 2009 was the Year of the Slumdog, this time around gives us a title fight between three strong contenders: Audience favorite “Avatar,” critics favorite “The Hurt Locker,” and even “Inglourious Basterds” as the wild card. It seems likely that Hollywood’s top narcissists will want to reward the film that gave the town a massive financial boost at a bleak economic time, but “Avatar’s” contrived and overlong narrative may be too much to get around. By contrast, “The Hurt Locker” is a highly acclaimed and therefore non-controversial piece of work, but it’s poor box-office may hinder its chances at a time when big-scale profits are essential.

Then again, the brand new voting system for the Best Picture category seems to throw a wrench in the very idea of a front-runner. What’s this, you ask? How has the voting system been altered? Well, see if you can follow this: In days of yore, Academy members simply picked which of the five nominees they liked the best, licked the envelope, and mailed it in. But now that the category has been super-sized, it would be all too possible for a film to win with only 11% of the vote, so now, a movie has to have at least 51% in order to take home the gold. Voters will rank the nominees from 1 to 10 (with 10 being the worst), and unless a particular film gets the majority vote outright, the lowest-rated picture is disqualified and those votes are dispersed amongst other films until a winner is declared.

Still confused? So am I; just go with it. Let’s say the lowest-rated film is “Precious” (I don’t like the film so I’m going to be rude to it because I can.) Since there is no majority, “Precious” is eliminated. Those who voted it in first place will have their second place votes go to those films, so if you voted “Precious” first and had “Up in the Air” second, you’ve just voted for “Up in the Air.” The cycle completes until there is a clear winner, but this means that it’s entirely possible for an outsider like “District 9” or “An Education” to unexpectedly swoop in and take home the gold. In conclusion, if you try to place your bets on Best Picture, you might as well spin around a hundred times, fall on your ballot, and pick whichever film falls closest to your left pinky.

No doubt about it, the Oscars are going through an identity crisis. Tune in to ABC on March 7 to see if it recovers and stays relevant. In the meantime, I’m going to continue circling around the Commuter Parking Lot every morning five minutes before class, because at least then I can predict without fail just how disappointing the outcome will be.

A close-up, intense stare from a Na’vi in the Oscar nominated 3-D film, ‘Avatar.’ (Photo Courtesy of wired.com)