The Oscars Conundrum in a Changing Movie Landscape
The movie industry has reached a reckoning. Years of push and pull between those who make movies and those who produce and televise award shows has lead to a breaking point that left some satisfied and others enraged. Last month, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced it would be cutting 8 of its 23 awards from the live Oscars show. They will instead present these awards celebrating craftspeople (like editors, production designers, film composers) before the show and debut their edited acceptance speeches during the telecast.
This alteration to the awards show followed a series of other small changes. Most notably, the Academy introduced several popularity awards where fans will be able to vote on their favorite 2021 movie scene using tweets and hashtags. The Fan Favorite award is a clear attempt to celebrate the only films that are commercially successful anymore, which happens to also be the only films the Academy refuses to celebrate (ex: Spiderman: No Way Home). So far, their plan is failing spectacularly as the Camila Cabello hive has come out in full force to lead the objectively bad Cinderella juke box musical to the top of the leaderboard.
In addition to these tweaks, the Academy announced the Oscars will have a host (hosts, actually) for the first time since 2018 and their show will feature “more time and opportunity for audience entertainment and engagement through comedy, musical numbers, film clip packages and movie tributes.”1 These changes should be contextualized by a recent rundown of the Academy Awards and their steady attenuation.
A Recent History of the Oscars
In February 2020, the Oscars telecast garnered the lowest audience in its history. Around 24 million viewers tuned in to watch Parasite win Best Picture. The slow decline in Oscars viewership has been a trend for the last half a decade. In 2014, over 43 million people tuned in. In 2016, 34 million. In 2018, 26 million.
In 2015, the Academy Awards were the 4th most watched telecast of the year, only trailing behind the Super Bowl and AFC Championship Game. In 2020, the show was number 8, trailing behind a bunch of football games and an episode of TV’s greatest, The Masked Singer.
Just a month later, a deadly virus swept the globe and the entertainment industry (as did everything else) shuttered. Theaters closed and companies stalled productions and delayed releases. Confronting the dual challenges of movie theater closures along with already declining viewership, the Oscars went in a new direction in 2021, inviting auteur filmmaker, Steven Soderbergh, to direct the show. The telecast looked noticeably different. It was broadcast from Union Station rather than Dolby Theater, with audiences sitting at tables rather than in an auditorium.
Beyond the distinct visual identity to the 2021 telecast, the show felt different, with no hosts, no performances and no clips to highlight the work of the nominees. All of this was to no avail as Oscars viewership spiraled downward by 58% from an all-time low 2020 audience to an even smaller audience in 2021. About 10 million people tuned into the telecast, placing it outside of the Top 100 most watched shows of 2021. Twelve separate episodes of NCIS reeled in more viewers than the premier movies awards show.
So naturally, the Academy had to do something. They reached an infliction point, knowing that the decisions they made regarding the 2022 show could determine the future of America’s most treasured awards ceremony. Their changes, however, have caused a great deal of anxiety in the film community. While the inclusion of fan-voted awards was largely brushed off as harmless pandering, the removal of about a third of the awards from the live telecast drew deserved backlash from cinephiles and creators alike. The backlash was especially visible on Twitter, where #Presentall23 became a popular signal of protest and shared disgust.
But casting the Academy or ABC off as evil or naïve lacks nuance. Rather than degrade either group, it’s valuable to describe the competing interests that place these disparate groups at odds.
The Academy, who wants an exciting show that honors movies and features movie stars
ABC Network executives, who want to create a popular, exciting and widely consumable awards show
Film dorks and creators, who want the proper respect shown toward the craftspeople that make movies great
What makes all of this a bit complicated is the fact that most American viewers are not die-hard cinephiles. The median Oscar-watcher cares more about movie stars and funny jokes than seeing fifteen people from the makeup department of Cyrano thank their families. While this is unfortunate for the incredibly talented people who work on the already lesser appreciated aspects of these movies, ABC and the Academy are trying to create a show. And a show, for that matter, that is accessible to audiences beyond the most enthusiastic movie-goers. To do so, the show’s producers are calculating that a condensed presentation of these “smaller” awards will help create a “tighter and more electric” broadcast that will keep folks engaged who maybe watched King Richard and Dune but not Audible, Lead me Home, or The Queen of Basketball (nominees for Documentary short).
Now, while these groups have their differences, they share a common goal: the survival of movies. Each care a lot about cinema and want the art form to be at the center of culture. The Academy, filmmakers, and movie-goers are likely concerned with the state of the industry in a post-COVID world and the changing viewer landscape that has shifted movie watching from theaters to living rooms. They all likely feel tremendous anxiety about these changes and are doing what they can to respond. For the Academy and ABC, that means expanding the appeal of the Oscars beyond die-hard movie-goers. For cinephiles and critics, it’s collectively screaming at the Academy and network executives for pandering to an audience that doesn’t care about “real” movies.
Here’s what everyone gets wrong. The Oscars aren’t unpopular because they air long speeches by editors and makeup artists. And contrary to the opinion of critics and cinephiles, the Academy is not killing movies by removing the award for best Sound Design from the live show. The Oscars are less popular than ever before because movies are less popular than ever. Movies are not at the center of the cultural conversation anymore. The Oscars are not to blame for that. They are a reflection of that.
So this begs the question- why are movies unpopular right now? Or rather, why are movies not resonating among culturally engaged populations? In my opinion, the relationship between movies and culture is formed and defined through two separate experiences- consumption and conversation. To understand why movies are not as culturally resonant as they have been, we must understand how the ways we watch and talk about movies have radically shifted in the span of a few years.
COVID-19
Most obviously, COVID-19 changed how we watched movies. Movie theater closures stripped American audiences of a communal space to gather and watch movies for the first time since the creation of movies themselves. And without a place to screen films, distribution companies held on to them, hoping to weather the storm and release them in a less precarious time. All together, the lack of movies released and the lack of theaters to view those movies in resulted in plummeting ticket sales and box office returns. In 2019, the movie industry made over $11 billion. Just a year later, movie revenue plummeted by over 80% to around $2 billion. Even though access to COVID vaccines is at an all time high, 2021 brought new COVID variants that made movie-going a challenge yet again. So while ticket sales and box office returns bounced back ever so slightly, they still have not even reached half of their 2019 numbers.
Movie theaters are a place of consumption and conversation. In the before times, a trip to the movie theater with friends involved watching a movie on a big screen and then talking about it afterwards. The theatrical experience dictated the ways we engaged with movies as a culture. The risk of contracting a transmissible virus imbued danger in the theatrical space, requiring audiences to change where we watch films and shift how we talk about them after.
The Rise of Streaming
However, there is another factor responsible for the decline of public movie going- the rise of streaming services. Streaming services are no longer simply content libraries, but creative brands that have formed their own artistic identities and original storytelling prowess. They produce their own content and distribute others, monopolizing the storytelling process- from conception, to production and all the way to placement on their service. This is all happened rapidly. In 2015, Netflix released their first original movie, Beasts of No Nation. Just a year later, Amazon became the first streaming service to distribute a Best Picture nominee, with Manchester by the Sea. Just three years later, two of the nine Best Picture nominees were Netflix original films. And in the 2022 Best Picture race, half of the best picture nominees were available day-and-date on streamers and three of those five films were produced by streaming services. So to summarize, in the span of just five years, streaming services have not only started making movies, but have become as acclaimed in the critical community as big movie studios, and as influential in the movie distribution business as theaters.
COVID and streaming services have fundamentally shifted the way movies proliferate through culture. It may not feel that different to watch a movie on your TV compared to watching it in a movie theater, but the world events and technological developments that have changed the consumption of and conversation around movies have caused a dramatic shift in the way movies fit into the cultural landscape. But beyond these changes in the medium itself, other trends indicate that audiences have been less interested in movies for awhile now.
Movies are Less Important
The movie-going experience has become undeniably less ordinary and more eventized over the last decade and a half. According to Gallup, Americans saw an average of 4.8 movies a year from 2001-2007 and 30% of viewers flocked to the theaters more than 5 times a year. In 2021, on average, Americans watched between 1 and 2 movies in a theater and less than 10% watched over five. The data is even more polarizing when split by age group. In 2007, 18-29 year-olds saw over 9 movies in theaters while the same demographic only saw about 3 movies in theaters in 2021. This is the largest percent decline among all age groups.
The data is telling us that for a number of reasons, people are watching movies in movie theaters a lot less than they did about a decade ago. Furthermore, the same age group that drives most cultural conversations are contributing most to that decline.
I’m not here to give a definitive answer on why movie-going has become less and less common. I only can posit a number of factors that have contributed to this precipitous decline. COVID, the rising prices of movie tickets, and the proliferation of streaming services have marginalized the movie theater. But when it comes to young people and their declining interest in the movie-going experience, we can start to look at new forms of entertainment and popular media as competitors in an a saturated market of consumption.
Basically, there is too much to do and too much to watch. Reality TV, prestige TV and sports take up tons of time. In addition, the internet has created services like YouTube and most recently, TikTok, democratizing and modernizing content creation. While the number of things to watch has drastically increased, the time we have to do so has not. And the more there is to watch, the more there is to talk about. With the advent of social media, on any given day I can talk to an amorphous community of people who are deeply passionate about any number of things. But in general, a more saturated landscape of art and content paired with social media has lead to a more fragmented cultural conversation. Even though there is more to watch and talk about, there is less consensus on what it is we all should be talking about.
These contextual factors have made the movie landscape murkier than ever. Groundbreaking shifts in the way we engage with movies have lead to an obscured understanding of their relevance in the current cultural moment. Basically, I don’t know if movies are important to people anymore because it’s really hard to tell. Based on personal experiences and anecdotes, movies feel less relevant than ever.
What I Think This Means
The film industry is in a precarious moment the places where people consume movies are changing and the movies that audiences respond to are also changing. At this moment, the Academy and ABC are trying to create a popular and populist show that will largely celebrate unpopular movies. It’s a tough ask. All while critics and cinephiles freak out over the notion that the Academy would slight the very artisans and craftspeople that their core audience cares most about.
My prediction is that none of this matters. I think ABC and the Academy will likely succeed in creating a more entertaining and zippy show, full of star-power, performances and showmanship. And they will probably do so by cutting some of the less flashy awards. But changes to the show will not determine audience engagement. 57 million people watched the Academy Awards in 1998 because Titanic was the biggest cultural phenomenon of 1997. The popularity of the 1998 Oscars had nothing to do with the telecast itself but the cultural context surrounding it. The same will go this year. Neither the show itself nor the movie industry it celebrates will live or die because of changes to the awards show. The Oscars will be commercially successful and culturally relevant when movies are. Network executives and Oscar producers don’t decide that. Audiences do.
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/02/awards-insider-eight-categories-cut-from-live-oscar-telecast#:~:text=The%20Academy%20plans%20to%20cut,winners%20into%20the%20live%20telecast%2C