Hindustan Times (Patna) - Hindustan Times (Patna) - Live
Oscars go on a reform spree: Popular award, duration cut
Organisers of Hollywood’s annual Academy Awards, under fire for a drop in ratings and accused of elitism, on Wednesday announced the creation of a new category to honour top blockbusters and said that they’d shorten the ceremony to attract more TV viewers. “Change is coming to the Oscars,” tweeted the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which puts together the glittering awards gala each year in late February or early March.
Earlier this year, the 90th Oscars on March 4 lasted nearly four hours, and posted all-time low TV ratings with 26.5 million viewers. For 2019, the organisers are hoping to produce a “more accessible” three-hour show — by presenting some of the awards during commercial breaks, said Academy president John Bailey and chief executive officer Dawn Hudson, addressing members.
Edited excerpts of those presentations will then be shown during the broadcast.
They will also create a new award for “outstanding achievement in popular film” — a response to accusations that for the past decade or more, the Academy has honoured arthouse fare only seen by limited audiences. The final reform will be to hold the ceremony earlier in the year — in 2020, it will shift to February 9. In 2019, the scheduled date of February 24 will be maintained. “We have heard from many of you about improvements needed to keep the Oscars and our Academy relevant in a changing world,” Bailey and Hudson said in a letter to members. “The board of governors took this charge seriously.”
But even the new measures were immediately met with criticism, with some people suggesting that the new “popular film” category would mean critical and box-office hits like Black Panther being snubbed in the race for the coveted Best Picture statuette.
“The last thing that the Academy should now be doing is creating a reactionary new category that is, in effect, the Popular Ghetto,” said Owen Gleiberman, the chief film critic for Hollywood news outlet Variety. He added, “Instead, it should be working to take off its blinders and make more room in the big tent for every movie that comes out. That’s how to win viewers back to the Oscars without trashing the essence of what movies are.”