Eh, I have respect for some of the better film critics, but this was a calculated decision to pull in the MTV crowd and boost profits for the majors. Pretty much anyone inside the industry recognizes this as so. Like I said, it'll be the individual guild awards that will have the most merit here on out.
The sad thing is that a lot of smaller films were financed by majors within the past twenty years for the sole reason of cashing in on Academy nominations. Yes, it resulted in a lot of typical Oscar bait (Crash), but we got some genuinely good flicks from that run. The fact that majors can now rely on the tentpole flicks to gather nominations, means they'll be less likely to finance smaller flicks.
This is in addition to the fact that the majors were already significantly reducing the amount of films they were producing, opting to focus on tentpole flicks instead.
And really, that's not good for anyone.
