The Oscars Show Has a Movie Problem
The 2022 Academy Awards aims to honor the very best in motion pictures. The problem? The 2022 Oscars show wants to appeal to a broad audience. That's not going to happen.
The 94th annual Academy Awards on March 27 will once again celebrate and reward movie excellence, at least according to the votes of the almost 10,000 voting membership. When the nominations were announced in February, including for Best Picture, as expected, there were the usual cheers for some surprise picks (such as critics darling "Drive My Car," a three-hour film in Japanese) and some cries of omission (such as for global mega-hit "Spider-Man: No Way Home, which was not going to be nominated in the first place).
But after all the dust settled, a familiar refrain could be heard across "Film Twitter" and among media pundits — "Is anybody really going to watch the show?" And by watching, that's in mass numbers, as audiences did back in the glory days, such as when "Titanic" won Best Picture in 1998 to a captive television audience of over 55 million viewers.
Since that peak, the Oscars show has been like a slowly sinking ship in terms of overall audience interest. Last year’s pandemic show, nicknamed the “Oscars in the train station” as it was held at Union Station in Los Angeles, drew only 9.2 million viewers, an all-time low.
After the Academy extended their television contract with ABC in the United States until 2028, the Oscars show producers have faced continued pressure, at times directly from the network itself, to shore up the sagging ratings. A few years ago, the idea of giving out a "Most Popular Film" Oscar was floated around, but then was quickly shot down by the members.
This year will be no different. Already this year's show producers are promoting a Twitter contest for fans to share their favorite film of last year with the "winner" (No Oscar awarded for this, though) to be announced during the show.
Another even more massive change will be that eight awards are now currently scheduled to be announced before the actual broadcast, with the winners' acceptance speeches recorded and then edited into the live show.
While other award shows like the Grammys and the Tonys have done this for a while now, it remains to be seen if the Oscars will a) actually go through with it after a backlash from, the specific guilds whose categories were picked to be handed out pre-broadcast, diehard Oscar watchers, and film critics and b) will this format shake-up actually attract additional viewers who might have been on the fence about watching in the first place.
Yet, no matter what promotions or format changes this year's Oscars show producers try to pull off, the reality is that for several years now fundamental changes in the theatrical business, along with the actual membership of the Academy, are turning the awards themselves into something very different from what the network and the show's producers hope they would be.
Traditional Studios Are Getting Out of the Oscar Business
It's not like that the traditional Hollywood studios have stopped greenlighting the so-called "Oscar bait" films. It's just that they have been releasing far fewer of them over the last ten years. The reason is that the major studios are more focused on action or graphic novel-based films that appeal to a younger audience that bring in big box office numbers.
Now, newer distributors (such as Neon and A24 to name a few) and streaming platforms (Netflix, Amazon, Apple TV+, etc.) are more likely to release dramas or even international films as they aim to build up their audiences. Especially among older adults who are more likely now to wait and watch a film at home rather than venture out to a movie theater, especially with the pandemic.
For example. "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" starring Brad Pitt was a huge box office hit back in 2008 that earned 13 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. While the film cost a reported $167 million to make, it brought in over $335 million in worldwide revenue, along with critical acclaim and all those Oscar nominations.
Today, it's hard to see Paramount and Warner Bros., who released "Button" back in 2008, going ahead to make such a film today. Now, "Button" would likely be made, at a much smaller budget (if possible given all the visual effects) and released by one of the streaming companies.
The days of a huge, broadly appealing, even "epic" film that connects with multiple audiences and enjoys sweeping critical acclaim are just getting harder to make. And when they do, they usually now happen perhaps once every five years or so, not every year. And while those kinds of films, when nominated for Best Picture and other categories, can help drive audiences to the show, it's unlikely those same audiences will tune into the Oscars the following year when smaller films are in the running.
While most of this year's Best Picture nominees were released by traditional studios, expect the trend to shift to streaming platforms and smaller companies in years to come.
Academy Members Are More International Than Ever
In 2015, the social media campaign #OscarsSoWhite was launched in response to that year's Oscars acting nominees being all white. The resulting backlash against the awards, and the real lack of diversity among the overall voting members led to efforts by the Academy in subsequent years to expand the membership beyond its normal heavy concentration of white men working in the industry living in Southern California.
In 2020, the Academy announced that in its recent class of newly invited members, 45% were women, 36% were from underrepresented ethnic/racial communities, and 49% were international from 68 countries.
But it's the growing international base of the Academy's membership that is steadily becoming perhaps its most influential, especially when it comes to selecting nominees.
In the past, "foreign films", which are now more appropriately called international films, were rarely nominated outside of the lone "Best Foreign Language Film" category that was changed to "Best International Feature" in 2019. While actors, directors, cinematographers, etc. who were not from the U.S. received nominations in their respective categories, an international film earning a Best Picture nomination was and still is extremely rare (As of 2022, only 13 non-English language films have been nominated for a Best Picture Oscar).
Yet with the growing base of international members, the momentum has shifted to including films in other languages within the Oscars' biggest awards, including Best Picture.
"Roma" in 2018 followed by the hugely successful and surprise 2019 Best Picture winner "Parasite" proved that the shift was not just a one-time thing. Since then "Minari" in 2020 and "Drive My Car" for 2021 continued the trend of at least one non-English language film being nominated for "Best Picture.”
As more international films are nominated in more categories, it proves that the overall membership is more open to recognizing films made around the world, and not so much always focusing on films made in "Hollywood". If the trend continues, which it probably will, it's very likely that future Oscar nominations list in multiple categories will feel more like Cannes or even the Berlin or Venice Film Festival, which focus heavily on European and world cinema, instead of a round-up of American made films.
Movies Are No Longer The Dominant Entertainment Form
Finally, the most significant cultural shift directly impacting the Oscars show that the producers really cannot change is the simple fact that movies are no longer the dominant form of entertainment in the world.
Today's internet, social media, and now streaming-focused society are watching many different forms of media and entertainment not found at their local multiplex theater. This includes scripted shows, reality shows, gaming, and all those bite-size videos on Instagram and TikTok.
Streaming (basically what television used to be before everything moved online) is now where the industry and where audiences are spending most of their time. Just think about it. When were you last with colleagues and friends, either at the virtual or real water cooler during work, and talked about the latest movie you saw? Probably not. More likely, the conversation was more about "What new shows are you watching?" or "Did you catch that new series on Netflix?"
Today, viewers are more likely to keep up with a new series or new seasons of their favorite online show rather than new releases at the movie theater. Unless, of course, those films happen to be huge tentpole features like "Spider-Man" or the latest "Batman" reboot.
Even the Emmy awards, which focuses on television and streaming, saw a decent uptick in viewership last year for its own show, and that was despite the recent trend of declining ratings for awards shows across the board. Whether the Emmys will continue to see a rise in ratings, is anyone's guess, but it just points to the fact that streaming shows, no matter the platform, is dominating viewers' attention spans over movies.
It's About Raising Awareness, Not Money
Film watchers, fans, critics, and those in the industry, are increasingly looking to the Academy Awards to be the definitive celebration and recognition of achievement in filmmaking. And while some might feel the awards themselves are becoming more elitist and less attuned to popular tastes, those who are invested in the Oscars are more and more accepting of that fact. While it's understandable, especially for a legacy network like ABC, to want a broadly watched show, the reality is that the awards themselves are really not aimed at a broad audience anymore.
And the Academy itself will do just fine even if this year's ratings are not great again. Yes, the Academy does profit financially from the licensing deals it made with ABC, and other international networks, for them to have the rights to show the Oscars telecast. But deeper than that, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, the organization that oversees the Oscars, has a huge endowment built upon years of savvy financial investments.
According to The Wall Street Journal, in 2020, the Academy enjoyed over $131 million in revenues just from the show itself. And, its overall financial net assets in 2020 were over $789 million for the same year.
At one time, the Oscars show was one of the year's biggest "must-see" events. Mainly because back in the day when there was no internet, no social media, and only three legacy television networks in the U.S, the Oscars were really the only way to see movie stars, live, and as themselves, for one night of the year. All that has changed, as has "Hollywood," and the hopes by the industry that today's mass audiences will once again stop everything and tune in, are just that — a hope.
Attempts by the Oscars show producers to change the format, that perhaps include more trailers of future blockbusters or even contests to lure younger audiences will not address the reality that the theatrical movie business has fundamentally changed and that the Academy membership, more or less, is focused on recognizing overall filmmaking achievement across world cinema, rather than choosing films in hopes of attracting more viewers.
If that means that the Oscars show itself is smaller in terms of audience, but more impactful on its influence on film production and history, perhaps that's the real award right there.