the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences announced today that going forward, we'd see 10 nominees for Best Picture, with no changes to any other category. Rumor has it Best animated Feature was on the bubble but still made the cut. A little history for the unintiated: in the first year, covering 1927 & 1928, there was no Best Picture award, but two separate ones: Most Outstanding Production and Most Artistic Quality of Production. Each had three nominees, but only one movie in common for both: Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans. Wings is erroneously credited as the first Best Picture because it won Outstanding Production and Sunrise won Artistic Quality of a Production.

They unified the awards as Outstanding Production which became For the three years following, they did five nominees until the 1932 awards when they expanded to 8. The next year, 1933 they stepped up to 10, then doing 12 in 1934 & 1935. They dropped back to 10 from 1936 until 1943, the year Casablanca won.