This story originally appeared in The Race Begins issue of TheWrap’s Oscar magazine.
How many?
That’s the question we ask every year around this time, surveying the field of Best Picture Oscar contenders and trying to figure out not only which of them will please Academy voters, but how large a slate will make the cut. In the four years since the AMPAS Board of Governors opted for a variable number of nominees between five and 10, we’ve had nine nominees three times and eight nominees once. (For reasons we’ve gone into in the past, it’ll likely never be 10.)