THB #684: Industry Tipping Point - Pt 2, Fixing Oscar

As I started in THB #683…

Awards events are in trouble.
Independent Film is in trouble.
Festivals are in trouble.

These events are separate… but connected.

I believe they have all suffered under the weight of major changes in how content is delivered and experienced and a failure to find ways to adjust without giving up their core ideals.

We just finished the Oscar season and I was disgusted to see the paid leadership of The Academy publicly celebrating an alleged uptick in viewership, based exclusively on Disney’s unconfirmed reporting of streaming numbers as being about 10% of the entire domestic audience for The Oscars… not because an uptick is not better than a downtick… but the “win” is still an audience of under 20 million viewers. That 20 million viewer mark has now been in place for 5 straight years, with the awards previously never seeing such a small audience in modern Oscars history.

Why are they celebrating failure?

Meanwhile, the Golden Globes were down from the year before, with about half the Oscars audience, but Penske outlets misreported the ratings as up initially. Like Oscar, the last 5 years have been their worst 5 years, unable to crack double digits. The #2 award show, The Grammys, last saw 20 million viewers in 2017.

Is there a solution to this problem? Because as bad as these results are, I have been able to find absolutely no acknowledgement of the television audiences for the delayed Critics Choice Awards, which went from The CW to E! and The Independent Spirit Awards, which were on YouTube only for, I think, the 3rd year in a row.

The annual excuses that always come up are about the movies being nominated, their release patterns, the host, and “the culture significance.”

Starting with the last one of those… just bullshit… from here to eternity. Movies have not been the dominant cultural medium for about 50 years now. The weight of the cultural impact is based almost exclusively on the media coverage of Oscar and all that is around it. And the media has not only changed, but it is, in this arena, not driven by any real measure of what is important, but by what sells newspapers and magazines. It was never an even playing field.

Year after year, even as I too have spent the relative king’s ransom it costs to attend, The Cannes Film Festival gets a lot of media attention from US and Canadian media. Why? Not because it matters to what ends up happening to those films in the US and Canada… but because it’s a great and glamorous film festival om the water in the south of France and who the hell doesn’t want their editor to pay their way there? I love it too. And every year, I have to consider whether my editor - me! - wants to drop $8000 or more to spend a week seeing 30 - 35 movies surrounded by other true movie lovers and all kinds of glorious mishegoss. (That’s Yiddish for a kind of delightful madness.)

I have spent it before. I will spend it again. But that’s over $200 per movie. Should The Trades be there? Yes. And they have a machine set up to turn it into a profitable event. And I am good with the New York Times, LA Times (as it was), Chicago Tribune, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, etc covering. But most of the American press that goes is just doing cosplay. Cannes is absolutely critical for European media. But for domestic press, it is a glorious indulgence.

But I digress (or get ahead of myself)…

The Oscar ratings are not flailing because of the cultural position of movies. The idea that the cultural significance of movies has changed so dramatically is really a function of not realizing how much of a bubble it was in the past.

What The Oscars represented each year was, ironically, like what theatrical movies that find an audience of significant size who are not frequent moviegoers… like, say, Barbie or Wicked or Avatar or Spider-Man, etc. Or, to be deeply honest and risking being pot-stirring, The Passion of The Christ.

In the past, there were 5 Best Picture titles - a group that has always dominated most categories in which they are also nominated - and yes, more people who watched had seen a higher percentage of them. But it doesn’t take a genius to realize that if you double the number of films nominated for Best Picture, fewer people will have seen as high a percentage of them. “I saw 60% of the movies,” albeit a phrase no human has ever spoken aloud, meant 3 of 5 in the old days and now means you have to have seen 6 of 10. Only a small percentage of Oscar viewers are seeing 6 of the Best Picture nominees… this only makes sense.

And yes, it doesn’t help to have them all bunched up at the end of the year… and even have the ones that opened before November only getting the added wave of promotion in that same end-of-year period… and nowadays, most of those being on Subscription Streaming by the time the December/January nominations races re-focus people’s attentions on those films.

What was the experience of Oscar for people who were not frequent moviegoers in the past? Movie stars at their glamorous best. Talent that didn’t seem like they were at the end of a 6-month-long race. A host who just moved things along and only did chunks of material about themselves if they were directly related to the movies. A sense of something special… something that we didn’t get every week…

$98.4 million worldwide

I went back to a random year… 20 years ago. Five nominees. The highest grosser was $83 million domestic (Brokeback Mountain), which was the 22nd highest grosser amongst films released that year. Not nominated were any of the Top 10 grossing titles, the top 8 of which were sequels or remakes. But also not nominated were somewhat commercial titles that had critical acclaim, like Walk The Line, Jarhead, Cinderella Man, Memoirs of a Geisha, Syriana, Pride & Prejudice, and The Constant Gardener.

With due respect to Matt Dillon, Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, David Strathairn, and Eric Bana, there wasn’t a major movie star in the leads of any of the Best Picture nominees.

And yet, 38.9 million people watched the Oscar show that year, hosted for the first and last time by Jon Stewart.

What happened to half that audience?

Well… the internet changed a lot about how we interact with celebrity. Actors post - and are encouraged to post - images of themselves on the regular to Instagram or Tik Tok or wherever.

One of our biggest movie stars, Jennifer Lawrence, was hacked along with a lot of other actresses and exposed in her most vulnerable state… which seems to have led directly to a series of movies in which she got naked… which seem to have stopped her career in its tracks. There is also a time limit to how long one can be precocious as a star and that may have contributed equally to our losing her luster. But the natural step to her Next Act seems to have been derailed. She is now a mom and I honor that deeply. She looks great… which I shouldn’t know, but her picture keeps showing up online in whatever outfit she is wearing to go have lunch. I should only know the next great movie she is enhancing with her acting skills and natural charm. I have missed her work.

We are also in an era where movie stars are no longer unwilling to shill products on TV. It used to be that they only did ads for foreign-language countries with big checks to hand out. Now we have Jeremy Strong in a barrel of coffee for Dunkin’ Donuts, along with Ben Affleck and a parade of New Englanders. When Team Sandler had Al Pacino do a mock Dunkin’ Donuts ad in the mostly hideous Jack and Jill it was incredibly funny because it was so absurd. Now, it’s not unexpected.

This season, Oscar had two $700 million+ worldwide grossers nominated for Best Picture (Wicked and Dune II). And both surely got a bunch of votes.

But here is the rub… while these hugely popular films have a lot of fans, I would be shocked if you put 10, 100 or 1000 people who had seen all 10 films that were nominated in a room and didn’t end up with one of the “smaller” pictures winning the day.

So what is The Academy supposed to do with that?