THB #320: 3 Weeks To Oscar/10 Days To Final Voting

What has become much more clear this season than ever before in the 25+ seasons that I have covered the Oscar race professionally is that the system has become stuck in its own old habits, even as it has been changed dramatically by a mass expansion of international voters and the arrival of a Streaming ecosystem that values patience like horny teens in the backseat of a car on Saturday night.

I recently had a long chat with one of the people who has been part of creating this show biz Ouroboros. By the time we were halfway into the discussion, I was convinced that any real change was so far beyond the mindset of those who inherited The Monster - and then “perfected” The Monster - that any effort on my part to suggest making change was like the first act of any disaster movie when the “expert” goes around telling the powers that be that they can still save lives if only they act right now.

As anyone who has seen an Irwin Allen movie, the “bosses” never listen and we spend the next 90 minutes of the movie focused on a handful of survivors personally connected to the “expert” while large numbers of other people die off-screen.

In some ways, it’s like the old thing where if your parents are now participating in the hip new thing, the hipness is over, and “the kids” will be on to a new thing. But in the Oscar Industrial Complex, the parents and the kids are in the same bubble - the same people, really - pretending for our own emotional benefit that change is something we really control.

I am not anti-award. I am a believer in change. I understand that Thelma and Louise felt something singular and in many ways thrilling and positive as they drove off the cliff. And then they landed.

I guess what I am saying is that I am one schmuck counting the number of lifeboats on the Titanic before the first cruise and telling people that there are not enough of them for everyone while the “managers” have no interest in harshing the buzz of launching a ship that cannot be sunk.

It’s what brought back The Golden Globes to NBC this year and all of that talent that showed up. Without ever expressing it explicitly, The Industry decided that their second highest profile event for what we used to call film would be a bunch of no-name manipulators, salaried, in most cases, for more money by HFPA than any of their “media outlets” to vote for films. A literal paid award, controlled and privatized by the owner of the production company that made the group famous, the “voting group” itself, and the hotel in which the awards would take place… in a partnership with the owner of all the major trades covering the industry.

Say what you like about The Academy… it is 100x more legitimate as an awards body than The Golden Globes. Maybe National Society of Film Critics is 300x more legit… and the NYFCC and LAFCA are 200x more legit (aka, less complex and not dealing with a TV show), but of all the televised awards shows, The Golden Globes is the only for-profit entity in existence only to continue to grow its profits for owners and members alike.

There will be only 3 televised movie award shows broadcast on television in America this season. The Oscars, The Golden Globes, and The Critics Choice Awards. The Globes had about 6.3 million viewers, down from its pandemic low. Critics Choice has about 900,000, its worst showing in the last 6 years. Last year, The Oscars rose to its 2nd worst viewership numbers ever, up from the April COVID show of 2021, to about 16.6 million.

Also this year, The SAG/AFTRA Awards fell off of television altogether at the end of their TNT/TBS contract, airing this year on YouTube and due to be on Netflix next year.

Pretty much every single discussion I have about the televised future of The Academy, the HFPA, Critics Choice, and SAG/AFTRA is about how little they will be getting paid on their TV deals and how low the budget has to go in order for them to stay on any form of television, aside from free streaming.

And I have spent 11 paragraphs avoiding what I really meant to do with this newsletter today… which is to suggest legitimate ways to avoid this already-happening disaster… the deadly battle between denial and da money.

If I am your ideal Oscar viewer, who is not currently likely to watch the show or see all the movies, how can The Academy and the Oscar participants best inspire me to do either or both?

The answer cannot be, “Keep doing what we’ve been doing, but vary it each year and pray that high grossing movies get nominated and hopefully, win.”

The answer is not, “Shorten the show to just the ‘important’ categories.”

Dragging out the repeatedly failed idea of making The Oscars into The Grammys is not only wrong-headed, but it doesn’t acknowledge the trouble the Grammys ratings are also suffering.

And by the way… polling on what people want from Oscar is worthless. Because the polling creates its own pool of ideas, as the potential audience doesn’t know what they want, but rather, only what they don’t want.

No one said, before Avatar, “I want a bunch of stretched human-like blue creatures to swing through the forest and protect a tree which connects them all against human invaders looking for a cool new power source with a comedic name.”

No one was saying 5 years ago, “I want to see Tom Cruise reprise a role with the only other recurring character being mostly speechless because his has suffered through cancer… and switch beach volleyball for beach football, okay?”

Great producers understand what audiences have liked, guess that they will like their variation on what has been successful, and take giant leaps of faith. It’s a low percentage game when it comes to wins. But the rewards can be massive.

Oscar is much further down the road than those producers. Those big scary hoops have already been jumped through. The Oscars are a bundle of already-proven films, refocused on which people consider “the best.” The goal is to get 40 million American households and many more across the globe to take an interest in that bundling and that competition.

So let’s take the limiters off the engine… if only in our imaginations.

Here’s an idea that may actually be illegal, as distributors are not allowed to set prices for exhibitors. But let’s assume The Academy is not a traditional distributor and can be given the leeway.

How about if…

Starting the weekend after nominations, The Oscars Best Picture Film Festival turned up in every possible multiplex in America, 2 screens per plex, 5 films on each screen each day (in schedule rotation), $7.50 a screening?