Awards season is upon Hollywood once again and with it comes its annual controversies. This year a certain British film received a particularly notable snub:  Sam Mendes’ Bond film Skyfall, failing to penetrate any of the main categories, including Best Picture. Dame Judi Dench has personally said she thought it was a great shame Skyfall failed to pull such a nomination. On the face of it this may not be that surprising; the last Oscar nomination for a Bond film was the 1982 For Your Eyes Only and Skyfall was not nominated for Best Film at the recently-held Baftas. However, if you recall the 2009 nominations for Best Picture, which included Avatar, the Skyfall snub feels particularly uncomfortable.  But this is not just a simple case of blockbuster-phobia; instead I believe it is part of a more general recent shift in Oscar selectiveness.

In 2009, the Best Picture nomination expanded from five films to ten. The inclusion of Avatar, Up and District 9 suggested that the Oscars were aiming to appeal to a broader audience of cinema goers. What has happened since, however, is that the Oscar nominations have actually shifted away from “the mainstream’” In 2010 Chris Nolan’s blockbuster Inception as well as Toy Story 3 received nominations, but at the same time, so did The Kids are All Right and Winter’s Bone. Both of these films had a very limited launch and Winter’s Bone won critical praise at Sundance the same year; hallmarks of less mainstream films.

A year later, this shift to the more arthouse end of the spectrum was also notable. Take Terence Malick’s The Tree of Life, nominated in 2011 and winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes as another example. Spielberg’s War Horse was probably the closest thing to a conventional blockbuster nominated and Best Picture winner The Artist, had a very limited release before the Oscar buzz sent Jean Dujardin and his thespian mutt to our screens.

Today we have a Skyfall snub, on the one hand, and nominations for Amour and Beasts of the Southern Wild on the other. Another Palme d’Or winner, Amour is a French language film portraying the love of an elderly couple, the wife of which is paralysed on one side of her body. It’s about as far from Michael Bay as it’s possible to be without imploding in its own tenderness. Similarly, Beasts of the Southern Wild, an American fantasy film, had a very limited release but won the Grand Jury Prize for a dramatic film at the Sundance Film Festival, as well as the Caméra d’Or at Cannes.

I was tremendously impressed by Sam Mendes’s Skyfall; personally I thought it felt like a thoroughly modernised version of Bond, imbuing the action style of the Bourne series with the narrative structure of a Chris Nolan film. But that Dame Judi Dench perceives as a snub may be part of a broader pattern, and not simply an aversion to franchises. In the very murky spectrum between entertainment and art, it seems the Oscars are shifting to latter. The nominations are a chance to include a wider array of films and I am glad lesser known films can gain much deserved publicity through the awards. But what the jarring omission of Skyfall three years after an Avatar nomination tells us is that the Oscars have a developed a confusing selection criteria which may alienate broader audiences, not to mention pissed-off Brits.