After augmenting their rules for last year’s ceremony allowing 10 movies to be nominated for the prestigious Best Picture Oscar instead of five, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences has decided to continue tweaking who they’re willing to bestow their little golden statuette upon.

Variety has confirmed that the Academy, after some urging from the organization’s f/x branch, has increased the number of films to be nominated in the visual effects category each year from three to five.

What does this mean?  It depends on how you look at it.

The pessimist would decry this news as a reflection of Hollywood’s increasing reliance on style over substance.  The market is now saturated with effects-based films to the point that the Academy has given up and decided to accommodate them.  The age of $400 million blockbusters that wow unsophisticated audiences with dazzling CGI effects but lack solid writing and effective storytelling and stick to safe tropes is here to stay and the entire industry is worse for it.

The optimist might point out the opportunity to recognize films with brilliant effects that directly serve a challenging narrative but aren’t necessarily known as effects-based films.  The optimist may also point out that the most innovative and thematically cutting-edge work has always come from outside the studio system, and always will.  Sure, the blockbuster is here to stay but with the falling prices and increasing availability of professional-grade equipment independent film is more exciting than ever and will remain a major force of artistic expression.

Of course there is also the possibility that this decision means absolutely nothing and is simply the product of the f/x community petitioning the Academy for fair recognition on par with the other minor Oscar categories.

All three scenarios are right.

The move really is likely a minor decision that probably should have been made years ago, not a direct response to Hollywood’s trending towards effects extravaganzas.  However, that trend is troubling.  Prior to Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws” (1975), cinema didn’t follow the summer blockbuster format.  So-called “event movies” didn’t really exist (with some notable exceptions), audiences could still see a good movie in February and Oscar-bait movies weren’t confined to the month or two immediately prior the Oscar ceremony.  Cinema has always been a business, and always will be.  But in the last 25 years that business has become an industry in the most base of terms.  Many cinéastes are alarmed, with good reason.

But, it is also true that more movies are being made today than at any other time in history.  Never before have so many creative and talented people had so much technology at their disposal.  Film festival attendance is up, video on demand and internet rental services like Netflix are growing exponentially and the general population is as enthused about film as ever.  Sure, the prospect of a small, edgy film like “Reservoir Dogs” from an unknown director getting a wide theatrical release today is considerably less likely than it was in 1992, but conversely, there are substantially more avenues for such a film to reach a wide audience than there were 20 years ago.

It remains generally true that if a filmmaker creates something worth seeing, and is dedicated enough to pursuing every avenue available, that creation will be seen.