Sorry, Oscars, You’re No Longer Trending - You’re Niche #OscarsSoBoomer
ACADEMYWell, the Oscar nominations were announced and, as per usual, the social media cacophony of celebrating nominees, jeering snubs, and providing social commentary on nominee choices began. The unpredicted omissions such as The Rescue for Best Documentary, Denis Villeneuve among the top five directors, and the recognition of anyone connected to Ridley Scott’s two 2021 films – except for those who adjusted Jared Leto’s hairline – will drift into the movie-industry ethos for only the truly movie-nerdiest of movie nerds to recollect. The snubs have had their day.
Not often, but sometimes, those snubs turn into pointed criticism that echoes for a while, periodically impacting change. For example, after a couple of years of negative attention from the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag, the Academy revamped its membership and award-eligibility rules with the tinkering and administering of these regulations still happening. Less obviously, there are examples where voters have appeared to rebound to correct previous rejections of the un-nominated. There are certainly anecdotal suggestions of such self-correction. A loud backlash to Wonder Woman’s Best Picture snub in 2017 seemed to call out nice and loud for all to hear that both “Super hero films can be worthy” and “big budget films directed by women or any other minority director deserves attention”. So, in 2018, the Academy appeared determined to take Black Panther’s critical and financial success extra seriously during the nomination process. In another instance, the expanded Best-Picture format beginning with the 2010 ceremony feels like a bit of kowtowing to populist forces languishing over The Dark Knight’s snub the year before. Is this year’s Most Popular Film Twitter vote a way to thank blockbusters who didn’t get proper Best Picture nominations?
This is to say that the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences is an imperfect and evolving outfit themselves, and there will always be recoil of some sort against the annual nominations. However, following nomination week, Oscar attention mostly shifts toward the ceremony itself. And an annual part of that discussion is always the brainstorming of how to save the television ratings for it broadcaster, ABC. Hollywood is an industry, after all, and the predominant metric that communicates success of showbiz’s biggest night is the broadcast ratings of the ceremony itself. The ratings peaked in 1998 (Nielsen Ratings of 57.25 million households), but like the ship that floated away with all the awards that evening, the ceremony’s ratings have slowly sunk into ghastly unheard of depths ever since. The 10.4 million estimated households who tuned in to the Oscars in 2021 represents an 81.8% drop in viewership from 1998.
How can the brain trust save the Academy Awards Ceremony—or at least stop the arterial bleeding of viewers and advertising dollars? How can they salvage some dignity for this iconic event after its lowest ratings since the innovation of counting viewers? The short answer is that they can’t. We are now a socially connected, 5G and device-networked, niche-marketed community with vastly different movie-watching habits, and tuning into ABC one Sunday in March doesn’t really fit any more. Hollywood has largely dispatched its star-system business model – despite Tom Cruise’s valiant efforts to save theatres and stay relevant – so red-carpet star-gazing holds only a fraction of the mass appeal that it once did. And then, there’s the challenge of appealing to an emerging generation who’ve grown up on the Internet as opposed to cable. ABC and the Oscars have been trying to attract interested viewers to tune in over recent years, but increasingly those people are simply choosing to swipe left. Despite this rejection, dialogue every year revolves around how the right host(s) can save the ratings.
Immediately prior to Regina Hall, Amy Schumer, and Wanda Sykes being announced as hosts, half of Hollywood had been rumoured. Old school pros such as Billy Crystal and Martin Short; popular dudes Dwayne Johnson and Kevin Hart; antiestablishment Ricky Gervais; a James Franco-Anne Hathaway repeat; comedian Meg Stalter; Kim Kardashian’s beau Pete Davidson; Hollywood influencers Zendaya and Tom Holland. I would not have been surprised if a hologram of Buzz Lightyear or YouTube sensation Mr. Beast had been considered. Each year the Oscars appear increasingly desperate to pick someone who will shake things up and attract new viewers.
It’s crazy to think there is any such saviour out there. The truth is that no host can remedy the realities of the movie business. Lots of love remains for film; unfortunately, people just don’t care about the Oscar ceremony as they used to. Firstly, people don’t ogle Hollywood personalities. Celebrity, fantasy, role-modelhood—those things have been packaged into apps on people’s phones. Secondly—and this is the one that probably hurts folks in the movie industry—the tradition of the ‘Oscar’ film is no longer mainstream; it’s niche. People just don’t know the nominees. No trending host will make people connect with Oscar films from a streaming algorithm that doesn’t resemble their own “If you liked Red Notice, you’ll like these” selections. Furthermore, planning the show with a number of live show gimmicks won’t matter either—if that’s what they’re thinking. I’m sure they’ve considered inviting The Rock to bench-press Kevin Hart or Tom Holland to swing in on a web to present awards, but no one is setting aside their evening for it—especially since those moments will be available and repeatable online five seconds later.
Society’s average attention span is diminishing. Entertainment is on-demand. What non-film geek would bother to set aside their whole evening when they can click video after video from PewDiePie? Or binge the new season of Ozark after they finish supper? Or swipe through social media streams that are strategically geared to appeal to their individualism? The Oscars doesn’t have a chance. They may recapture some viewership after last year’s sad, sad pandemic debacle, but it’s time for the Academy (and ABC) to accept the fact that the 9 million to 15 million who tune in on March 27, 2022, will be the film-loving faithful, and that’s about it. And not to sound like a grief counsellor, but I hope, too, that they can be at peace with that and stop arsing around with trivia questions from Lil Rel Howery.
ABC’s contract to broadcast the show goes until 2028. Its Oscar night ad revenues a decade ago were about $2.0M USD for an ad spot—God knows how low that’s sunk now. The Oscar Night ballyhoo has become nothing short of an albatross in ABC’s accounting cycle because people don’t care. The allure of an evening of televised red carpet royalty is now a vestige from an olden days’ TV-watching tradition. Celebrity star-gazing for Gen Z involves following influencers on Instagram. Ironically, Hollywood has itself contributed to this. They have largely done away with the famous ‘star’ system and reduced the scale of celebrity as part of cost-cutting and reimagining its business model. Movie stars don’t draw people to theatres any more. Theatres are mainly for brand-name super heroes. Mention the name of a traditional movie star, and odds are that marquee name has found his/her way into projects on streaming networks for a fraction of the pay that they once commanded. Hanks, Clooney, Bullock, DiCaprio—smaller films, smaller pay cheques, smaller screens. Even the next generation of stars whose celebrity was born in franchise films—the likes of Zendaya, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Holland, Gal Gadot, and Chris Evans—their non-IP projects are smaller fare and their celebrity does not guarantee a mass audience—at least not in ticket sales. By focusing attention on projects with brand-recognition and CGI, Hollywood has deemphasized the bluster of celebrity, which is a marketing and PR asset unto itself. Ahh, the irony. The less the studios pay its stars, the more money studios make, but the less the fans want to watch the industry celebrate itself because the film world no longer has larger-than-life stars.
The Oscars Awards ceremony has become Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. In Billy Wilder’s classic, Desmond—an icon of silent film—becomes deluded in her own relevance and grandeur within the industry while the rest of the world has moved on without her. Every year, the Oscars try to be produce a bigger and better show (2021’s Covid show excluded) and puff out their chest further and further, but they’re only fooling themselves about how much they actually matter to the general public. Inevitably, on March 28 industry reporters will be dumbfounded by more poor ratings and either try to assign blame or lie to themselves that the general public are actually watching the show on the Internet. Unless ABC and the Academy come to terms with reality, every ceremony from now until the contract’s expiry in 2028 will be an increasingly painful and pathetic display of self-congratulation directly pandering to the almighty, but absentee general public. They already expanded the Best Picture category to hold upwards of ten movies in an effort to pull in more popular appeal into the nominee mix. That didn’t stop the bleeding. Nothing will, sadly, because cinema-going has changed so drastically over the past decade.
The box office used to be a barometer of the industry and in itself was its own marketing device. Successful box office returns for awards contenders would generate their own word of mouth. Today, most films never see a theatrical run. Multiplexes have become the fertile farmland of cinematic universes. The crops being watered are franchises and the harvest has been profit, not prestige. Hollywood’s business model is this: It’s better to make one $200M Marvel movie and guarantee $500M+ than to gamble on making ten $20M films with unpredictable returns. The box office no longer has seasons as they once did. sBig movies can launch any time of year, and any gaps in the release schedule feature tiny-budget-high-return thriller. There is some, but ultimately very little cross over between this franchise management and Oscar love. Superheroes can have the box office, and little films can have the statuettes. Look at this year’s box office results for the following auteur films and awards hopefuls. Spencer, Belfast, The French Dispatch, King Richard, Nightmare Alley—box office results? None could muster over $35M worldwide, and only the Will Smith film could scrounge close to that. In comparison, No Time To Die’s first weekend’s receipts in North America and Europe matched the entirety of these five smaller films’ box office results, and No Time To Die’s take was considered a mild disappointment.
There was once a time when the fall awards season would actually boost box office receipts. In 2003, Mystic River, for instance, had a decent little box office run from October to Christmas earning about $50M in the US and Canada. Following its Oscar nominations, it made an additional $40M. The Oscar-prestige boost to revenue was a real thing, and a lot of films banked on (or gambled on) receiving word-of-mouth and awards-buzz business. Over the last decade, this has become less common. There used to be four or five films per year to make money that way. Titles such as La La Land, 1917, and Parasite did so during their recent awards season runs, but only about one film per year has been able to notably cash in on this. When the pandemic is finally over, it’s hard to imagine the box office situation improving. Oscar-bait films have become the focus of Netflix and Amazon. If Mystic River were made today, it would surface on a streaming platform.
The evolution of streaming giants has undoubtedly smudged some of the shine from Oscar night. Players like Netflix have bulled their way onto the scene and have impacted the awards season any number of ways. For starters, they exemplify the very on-demand service that ABC and the other broadcasters find themselves competing against. It’s not the just competition for viewership either. These companies are providing so much content that eludes the Academy’s eligibility that Oscar nominees account for a smaller percentage of films being seen. Classics on Criterion. Horror on Shudder. Netflix, Amazon, and Apple with their own originals. With so many services, movie watching has practically become customizable for customers, so awards hopefuls have become diluted in the greater conversation. All of that reduces the exposure of Oscar hopefuls and reduces interest in Oscar night. People watch whatever they want at home – mostly Oscar-ineligible stuff anyway – and the franchise spectacle gets seen in cinemas. It’s better for the consumer, and it’s overwhelming for film buffs suffering from FOMO, but it means that Oscar-hopeful films have become niche, and mass audiences are less inclined to care about lesser-seen films and the awards shows that honour them.
All of this is to say, that it’s a different world from what the Academy was accustomed to in previous generations of celebration. I don’t begrudge the organizers the marketing challenge. So do what you want, Academy. Bring in Cirque de Soleil, set up a Snoop Dogg half-time show. Hell, do another round of awkward film trivia hosted by Lil Rel Howery. Film fans will be there for you. The rest of the world won’t be, but film lovers will. Oscars, you’re just not as big a deal as you used to be. You matter. You matter in the industry, and you matter to film-lovers, but not to the masses. You’re niche now, and that’s OK. I hope the focus of Oscar night lies in producing a good show for film fans, not a pathetic ratings-appeal circus. Like I say, do what you will. I’ll be watching on March 27 as you come down the red carpet, ready for your close-up.