Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone recently asked “the best and the brightest” several basic questions about what’s broken and needs fixing in the Oscar realm. One of the questions was “why do you suppose the [Oscar telecast] ratings have dropped so dramatically since 2014?”
Here’s how The Ankler‘s Richard Rushfield replied:
1. RR: “The sector became bloated and self-important, glutted on a eight-month long season.” HE sez: The season was eight months long between ’20 and ’21, true, but it’s been a six-month thing for years and is reverting back to that.
2. RR: “They rested on an ancient creaky format that in every way is at odds with the entire drift of the culture.” HE sez: True, but how exactly could they have remedied this problem? The Oscars have been “the Oscars” since the late 1920s, and the televized versions hasn’t substantially changed since the early ’50s. Older viewers like the sameness of it all — the red carpet, the smart-ass jokes, the emotion, the tributes, the buildup to the big awards, etc. It is what it is. Millennials watch to some extent; Zoomers don’t care.
3. RR: “Hollywood stopped minting new stars that people were excited to see. The ones that did come along, we see far too much of already via social media, etc. Glamour requires some level of scarcity. Instead we’ve flooded the market with them.” HE sez: The only stars I care deeply about are ones who came to prominence in the ’90s and aughts, for the most part.
4. RR: “The stars when they were up there had became a bunch of pompous bores. Take a creaky old format, and throw in a bunch of fantastically rich people scolding their audience — and you’ve got a formula to chase audiences away in droves.” HE sez: Rushfield’s use of the term “scolding the audience” means industry wokesters admonishing Joe and Jane Popcorn for not getting with the progressive program.
5. RR: “But most of all, above all else, it’s a race between a bunch of movies that very few people have even heard of, let alone seen. Who is going to watch a race between some movies they’ve never heard of?”
HE sez: I’ve explained why Average Joes aren’t watching wokester movies.
6. RR: “If they can’t figure out how to address that last problem, then no other fix is going to make any difference.” HE sez: They’ll never fix this problem. The elite Hollywood community is going to have to accept the fact that they’ve politically isolated themselves from the hoi polloi, and that the Oscar awards no longer mean much to most of the country, and that they’re basically become about the values of “aggressive progressives.” The Oscars will simply no longer be the cash cow they once were, and they’ll have to downshift in scale and expense.