The Oscars isn’t dead yet
Viewers have been switching off in droves, but the most famous awards ceremony still has life in it
The film industry’s most famous awards ceremony, the Oscars, seems to be trapped in a “death spiral”, says Stuart Heritage in The Guardian. Viewers are abandoning the ceremony in record numbers and, following last year’s joke-free “gushfest held in a train station”, it is now “hard to see” that they will ever return. It won’t be for want of trying. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has come up with two “dramatic changes” for this year’s awards.
The first is that some of the awards won’t be televised live, but edited into the broadcast. That might be a disappointment for those receiving the awards, but it at least has the benefit of making the ceremony “less punishing” in length. The second innovation is more contentious. Faced with the criticism that the Oscars “celebrate a narrow stratum of middlebrow dramas” while anything “too expensive or popular is bizarrely shunned”, the Academy has decided to create a new “fan favourite” category, with the results collected via polls on Twitter – “the social-media platform that once voted to call a government polar research vessel Boaty McBoatface”.
Whether this is an “overdue embrace of modernity” or a “short-sighted gimmick” remains to be seen, say Jake Helm and Keiran Southern in The Times. But there are already indications that it will “backfire”. Fans of the disgraced Johnny Depp “have rallied together to spread support for his low-budget film Minamata”, which was met with “almost total apathy”, making just $2m. Another leading contender is the “critically derided” musical Cinderella starring Camila Cabello, a singer with 60 million followers on Instagram, whose fans are “tech-savvy teenagers more than capable of manipulating” internet popularity polls.
And the grown-ups wept
Oscars viewing figures do tend to be higher in years when blockbuster films such as Titanic, Avatar and Lord of the Rings are real contenders, says Bilge Ebiri for Vulture. But those films were “exceptional on an artistic or technical level”. To start nominating “whatever hit has caught the industry’s attention that year” wouldn’t just be “counterproductive”, but would also be “giving in to Hollywood’s worst tendencies”. Given that superhero films and other blockbuster action franchises “reign supreme”, giving them awards “simply for being blockbusters” would just “hasten the demise of any and all grown-up movies”.
Ironically, the decision to remove the live presentation of the more technical awards from the broadcast will actually reduce the visibility of blockbusters, which generally do well in these categories, says Ebiri. All this suggests that maybe sticking with the status quo would be the best solution. Every change made in an attempt to halt the decline has only made the situation worse, and the show itself isn’t doing too badly given that “the audience for live TV in general has been declining for decades now”. Rival award ceremonies would “kill to have the Oscars’ ratings”. The backlash against the changes is itself “proof of the hold that the Oscars continues to have on the popular imagination”.
“Introducing a fans’ favourite category risks the same result that named a polar research vessel Boaty McBoatface”