San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)

Former WOAI anchor in a ‘great place’ after sudden exit

- By Richard A. Marini STAFF WRITER

For 16 years, Delaine Mathieu was a steady, sunny presence on the WOAI-TV anchor desk, most of those years sitting alongside Randy Beamer, reporting and reading the news.

Then in March she was gone, an apparent victim of massive layoffs by the station’s parent company, the Sinclair Broadcast Group.

Sinclair, which slashed its workforce nationwide by about 5 percent, blamed the decision on the coronaviru­s pandemic, according to CNN.

Mathieu, 50, will neither confirm nor deny that the layoffs were the reason she left the station. But it’s not unheard of for popular, award-winning TV news personalit­ies like Mathieu to suddenly vanish from the air without warning or explanatio­n.

Still, she insists, there’s no reason to throw her a pity party.

“I feel like I just stepped off of a 30-year roller-coaster ride that was exhilarati­ng, fun and completely rewarding,” she said during a recent interview at her home just off TPC Parkway. “But I’ve been kind of winding down for several years now, thinking about retiring. So I’m happy and relaxed, and I’m in a really great place.”

That place is one where she and her husband are getting ready to see one daughter head off to college with another expected to do so in a few years.

Where she can explore her new love of painting while also preparing to take the exam to become a real estate agent. And where she’s finally free of the daily deadlines that come with anchoring the 5, 6 and 6:30 p.m. local TV news broadcasts.

Mathieu’s only public comment about her exit, which came just days after she hosted the station’s on-air farewell for a retiring Beamer, was in a tearful six-minute YouTube video in

LOS ANGELES — Neither intimate looks into stars’ living rooms nor scantily clad pop stars performing provocativ­e hits have been able to stop audiences from tuning out award shows this year. The ratings for the Grammys were down by 53 percent. Golden Globes viewership plummeted more than 60 percent.

Now, as Hollywood prepares for a coronaviru­s-delayed Academy Awards telecast at 7 p.m. tonight on ABC, it is faced with the ultimate doomsday scenario: that the viewing public is ready to toss its premier showcase into the entertainm­ent dustbin, plopped next to variety shows. Oscar, meet Lawrence Welk and his bubbles.

At a time when the traditiona­l film industry is fighting for its primacy at the center of American culture — with at-home entertainm­ent soaring in popularity and pandemic-battered theater chains closing — a collective shrug for the Oscars would send Hollywood deeper into an identity crisis.

And a shrug certainly could happen. Guts + Data, a research firm that focuses on entertainm­ent, said last month that only 18 percent of active film watchers (in theaters or at home) had heard of “Mank,” the Netflix film leading the Oscar race with 10 nomination­s.

“When even I find myself having a hard time caring, that’s a problem,” said Jeanine Basinger, founder of Wesleyan University’s film studies department and author of Hollywood histories like “The Star Machine.”

Some people in the entertainm­ent industry, whether out of optimism or denial or both, believe that award shows are simply going through a temporary downturn because of the circumstan­ces of the pandemic.

But Nielsen ratings for the Oscars were already in free fall before the pandemic, plunging 44 percent between 2014 and last year, when 23.6 million people watched the South Korean dramatic thriller “Parasite” win the top prize. An additional drop on a par with the Globes show in February would put the Oscars audience in the catastroph­ic single-digit millions.

Much more than vanity is at stake. The Academy Awards have long been an economy unto themselves, with companies like Netflix spending $30 million or more to campaign for a single film and Disney, which owns ABC, committed to paying more than $900 million for the worldwide broadcast rights through 2028.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is not conceding defeat. The organizati­on, which generates about $90 million a year in after-expenses income from the Oscars telecast, has handed the show to one of Hollywood’s most celebrated directors, Steven Soderbergh. He and his fellow producers, Stacey Sher and Jesse Collins, have been asked to shake up the telecast while also sticking to tradition (awarding statuettes in 24 categories, including the “boring” technical ones) and complying with pandemic safety restrictio­ns.

If that wasn’t difficult enough, the three have the additional challenge of attempting to jumpstart theatergoi­ng when most of the world is more than a year out of the habit.

“If we can get out at three hours and deliver a show that we see on paper right now, we feel like we will have had a cultural moment where the nation, the world, will say, ‘Yes, I love movies!’ ” said Collins, a veteran live-events producer who oversaw both this year’s Super Bowl and the Grammys. “That will get us another step back to theaters.”

The three are trying to reinvent the show yet are hamstrung by COVID-19 safety costs, which alone are taking up one-third of the production budget. The group is also adamant that the show will not take place over Zoom. Soderbergh had that provision written into his contract when he signed on to the project.

“I made it clear that that has to be the absolute worst-case scenario,” Soderbergh said of the ubiquitous pandemic technology. “It’s the Academy Awards. We all want it to be special, and that doesn’t feel special. It just doesn’t. It reminds us of the pain of the last 14, 15 months. Not the joy of cinema or going to the movies.”

In an attempt to make the show like an exclusive gathering, the producers are stepping into a logistical morass that will aim to get every nominee in front of a television camera at a designated location, whether at two Los Angeles sites — the downtown Union Station and the usual Oscars location, the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood — or one of 20 satellite spots around the world. (The largest hub will be in London.)

For Soderbergh, the decision to take the job at such a fraught time stems from his long history of complainin­g about the show. Whether he was in the room as a nominee or at home watching it on television, “the lack of intimacy” always bothered him.

“I didn’t find it a very pleasant experience to be in the audience,” he said of his two visits, one in 1990 as the screenwrit­er of “Sex, Lies and Videotape” and again in 2001, when he won best director for “Traffic.”

This year, the producers want to focus less on winning and instead make sure the notably diverse group of nominees has a better-than-average time by making the event more communal and intimate. They also intend to create a mask-free telecast that reminds audiences at home why they like going to the movies.

Not helping the producers’ cause is the slate of films they are celebratin­g. Even though the majority of the best picture contenders are available on streaming services, they remain relatively obscure. According to the Guts + Data survey, conducted the week of March 21, the bestknown contender was “Judas and the Black Messiah,” with 46 percent awareness. The frontrunne­r, “Nomadland,” registered only 35 percent.

Soderbergh acknowledg­ed there is only so much the producers can do.

“People’s decision-making process on whether to watch or not doesn’t seem to be connected to whether or not the show is fantastic or not,” he said, pointing to the strong critical response for this year’s Grammys, which notably featured a risqué performanc­e by Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B.

The Oscars telecast, on the other hand, saw its ratings peak in 1998, when 57.2 million people tuned in to see the box office juggernaut “Titanic” sweep to best picture victory. Since the turn of the century, the most highly rated year was 2004, when the academy honored another box office behemoth, “Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.”

With ratings expected to tumble for the coming telecast, ABC has been asking for $2 million for 30 seconds of advertisin­g time, down about 13 percent from last year’s starting price. Some loyal advertiser­s (Verizon) are returning, but others (Ferrero chocolates) are not.

“We’re really not getting much advertiser interest,” said Michelle Chong, planning director at Atlanta-based agency Fitzco, “and it’s not something we’ve been pushing.”

 ?? Robin Jerstad / Contributo­r ?? Award-winning journalist Delaine Mathieu spent 16 years as a WOAI-TV anchor.
Robin Jerstad / Contributo­r Award-winning journalist Delaine Mathieu spent 16 years as a WOAI-TV anchor.
 ?? Noel West / New York Times ?? Ratings for this Oscar broadcast last year followed the downward trend. If even more viewers tune out tonight, Hollywood could sink deeper into an identity crisis.
Noel West / New York Times Ratings for this Oscar broadcast last year followed the downward trend. If even more viewers tune out tonight, Hollywood could sink deeper into an identity crisis.

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