Ross Douthat, New York Times, March 7, 2018
Image from article, with caption: Jimmy Kimmel joking in his opening monologue about the Oscar statue
Excerpt:
There are conservatives, including the president of the United States, who take a special kind of glee in the declining ratings for the Academy Awards, which hit an all-time low this weekend under the stewardship of Jimmy Kimmel and in the shadow of hideous revelations about the film industry’s tolerance for rape.
You’ll get no glee from me. The decline of the Oscars is overdetermined: It’s nobody’s fault and everybody’s, shaped by the same trends driving down Big Event ratings all over and the same diversification of tastes and values and ideas, plus all the technological and economic shifts undercutting the old studio business models, all the inevitably shortsighted choices made by philistines in SoCal corporate suites, and all of our collective decisions to watch or not to watch what Hollywood churns out.
But it is still a decline to be regretted, a loss not only of entertainment and spectacle but also of the cultural common ground [JB emphasis] that our last mass-market art form once supplied. ...
[O]f course a certain kind of pulp entertainment will always tend to skew right-wing. But the more the only plausible Oscar nominees in terms of cinematic quality are passion projects and message movies — the kind of movies, to quote Kimmel, that are made “to annoy Mike Pence” — the more the film industry’s inevitable liberalism seems less one reliable theme of Oscar season than the symphony entire.
For some people in the movie business and the press that covers it, this may seem like a happy evolution, a shift toward more of a vanguard role in pursuing social change, with fewer political compromises and greater moral clarity in what messages the academy offers to the world.
But even if, as is fervently hoped, we are entering an age of stronger minority and female representation in cinema, without the mass audience that high-middle-brow cinema once enjoyed that representation’s influence on the American imagination will be limited. ... No matter how much more enlightened the movie industry becomes, what was 20th-century America’s most influential and unifying mass art form is increasingly a business of niche markets and lowest-narrative-denominator blockbusters … and it is not only conservatives who might reasonably regret that shift.
Like many cultural rituals the Oscars are peculiar and arbitrary and frequently absurd, but like many they have supplied a thread of unity and memory and shared experience for the millions who watch them every year. For the show to become a boutique affair for American liberals that’s sponsored by a globalized superhero content provider is not, I think, a happy change — and for all that it seems overdetermined and inevitable, it’s a transformation that filmmakers and moviegoers and academy members, in all their various ways, should still make an effort to resist.
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Hal Rubenstein, Why This Year's Oscars Drew The Lowest Viewership in Academy Awards History, forbes.com
The social media trashing started long before the long telecast was over.
It’s so boring, it’s so long, it’s not funny, where are all the big stars, there are no surprises….
Yet again.
Ratings released yesterday claimed the lowest viewership in Academy Award history. The President made sure everyone knew.
The question I’m curious to hear answered by anyone, is when was the last time you truly enjoyed an Oscar telecast front to back? It’s not as if it’s meant to be the return of The Carol Burnett Show? When has anyone ever gotten excited over who was going to win Best Animated Short Subject, let alone having seen even one of the nominees?
But there are current realities beyond The Motion Picture Academy Award structure that have now made it nearly impossible for the Oscars to be big fun.
The Ubiquity of Televised Celebrity
There are no less than five syndicated daily shows focused on the stars every move, who they’re with, and what they wear daily. There are six nightly talk shows (Fallon, Colbert, O’Brien, Kimmel, Corden, Meyers), all of which are successful, and one wildly successful daytime entry (DeGeneres) that require the appearance of at least a dozen and a half stars a day. Now add in the last hour of Good Morning America and The Today Show. Who haven’t you seen recently? For the two weeks prior to the opening of Red Sparrow, I caught Jennifer Lawrence on no less than eight of these programs. By time she showed up begoldened on the Swarovski framed stage, beautiful and talented as she is, it was impossible not to think “Oh, her again.” Except for a few veterans like Eva Marie Saint, who was surely unrecognizable to the generation that won’t watch a black-and-white movie, where’s the mystery, or the glamour in seeing any of these people on stage? We miss Elizabeth Taylor.
The Endless Awards Season
Statuette tossing is getting to be like football and basketball. It barely ends. The first chunks of crystal and plated metal were handed out in December. Not wanting to fight Nathan Chen’s quadruple jumps and the final downhills of Lindsay Vonn, ABC postponed its big night until after the Olympics, creating a time lag so drawn out (considering qualifying films had to be in theaters by the end of 2017) that Black Panther was one of the most mentioned films of the night, causing some to wonder why it hadn’t been nominated for anything [.]
The Calculated Murder of the Red Carpet
Instigated by Giorgio Armani in the '80s, elevated, or at least rammed into must-see-TV status by Joan Rivers on E!, the carpet existed for the answer to one question and one question only, “Who are you wearing?” When I was Fashion Director at InStyle we lived for it. But, besides the premature death of Joan, two recent events have transformed the cotton candy tickle of the red carpet into a slog.
Both NBC and ABC decided that since they were paying a fortune to telecast the Golden Globes and Academy Awards respectively, why were they offering up all that free programming to E! and local affiliates? So instead of our watching cable stations until the last minute and then quickly grabbing the remote to switch to the networks in anticipation of the main event, the networks banished the live reporting fashionistas to distant locations and commandeered the final hour, when everyone who matters arrives, for their own. In place of Joan, Ryan, or Giuliana, far be it from Matt, or Robin, or Samantha to stoop to such supercilious questioning as label citing. Instead, the conversation with distracted nominees, who were only too glad to recite what they were wearing because it meant they didn’t have to think, turned stilted when faced with ‘pithy’ questions like the meaning of their nominations and their movies to their lives.
Worse still, hog-tied to the same network, the red carpet became inseparable from the ensuing broadcast. And it’s turned out to be a hell of a lousy lead in.
And then Harvey happened. The rapid embrace of the #MeToo and TimesUp movement made it seem objectifying to resort to designer name dropping when dignity, parity, harassment, and inclusion became required mantras. No one can argue with these necessary and vital missions. But it makes for terrible television. The Golden Globes at least had the novel, though eventually numbing, conceit of let’s all wear black.
But by Oscar night, the rhetoric became expected. The most obvious proof of that was the unified appearance of Ashley Judd, Annabella Sciorra, Salma Hayek, three women whose careers were either threatened or destroyed by Weinstein onstage. I expected an exultant roar of the crowd. They received merely healthy applause.
Films Most Americans Haven’t Seen
The Globes have it easy. Because it incorporates numerous categories of television programming, which most of us watch, and because the Hollywood Foreign Press in unabashedly starstruck, it nominates roughly 70 actors and actresses—many of whom we’re familiar with. When the Academy failed to nominate Christopher Nolan’s sensational and sensationally successful The Dark Knight for Best Film in 2008, the outcry was so loud, that the Academy expanded the category to include ten films. But instead of using this to cast a more populous net, the reverse has happened.
Additions in Academy memberships that are younger and more diverse and rule changes have resulted in a near replay of the Independent Spirit Awards. As lauded as Call Me By Your Name, Lady Bird, Three Billboard, Phantom Threads and the victorious The Shape of Water are, the combined domestic box office gross of all these films was less than $200 million. The combined domestic box office gross of the very well liked but overlooked Wonder Woman, The Last Jedi, and Beauty and the Beast was $1.5 billion. Ignore the delight of the moviegoer who makes it all possible and why should anyone be surprised if they, in turn, ignore you. Great an actress as she is, ask the first 25 people you meet "who is Sally Hawkins?," the brilliant star of The Shape of Water. If they don’t know, and they won’t, why would they care if she wins?
Viewer fatigue at home — Audience fatigue in the Dolby Theater
At home, what was the suspense? Besides not knowing which one of three favored films few viewers had seen would win, Sam Rockwell, Allison Janney, Frances McDormand and Gary Oldman now have to build trophy rooms for having taken home nearly every statuette in sight. So no nailbiting there.
Inside the Dolby, the inevitable happens. The evening starts out almost vibrating with hopes, nervousness, constant bodice adjustment and dreams. Eventually 80% of those people are now “losers” and their thrill is gone. Hosts from Kimmel to Neil Patrick Harris talk about how you shouldn’t bother with jokes at the end of the night because your audience just wants to leave.
So hallelujah for McDormand’s call to action for all the female nominees in the room to stand and be cheered. It was a rousing surprise, the evening’s only spontaneous moment and even though her declaration of “inclusion clause” was missed by most still watching at home, everyone in the theater knew what it meant. Actors and actresses of note can demand this clause in their contracts which requires that there be diversity in every aspect of the film’s production, from camera operators to crafts people. For when all is said and done, unlike the Grammy's performance-laden broadcast, the Academy Awards, with its honors for editing and sound mixing, is still focused on those who are witnessing it live. We’re allowed to watch, but we should stop being so put out when it doesn’t turn out to be the greatest show on Earth. That’s why you go to the movies.
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