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I watched the Oscars telecast in 2021. It didn’t end with Nomadland winning Best Picture. No, instead they decided to end the broadcast with Best Actor. The working assumption was that Chadwick Boseman, who had died tragically young, was going to win. Then, Anthony Hopkins won for The Father, a movie most people hadn’t seen. He wasn’t even there. The show just sort of fizzled out. Weirdly, this may end up being the last Oscar moment I ever watch.
I’ve been a long-time Oscars watcher. I think 2003 or so was when I started watching the ceremony. While I still care to wins, I don’t intend to watch this year’s event. It’s not because of the hosts, though Regina Hall, Amy Schumer, and Wanda Sykes feel like they were thrown together at random. No, it’s because the Oscar telecast producers don’t seem to really care about the awards, or film.
They have decided not to air several awards. All the short films are booted. So is Original Score, and several more. The wins will still end up on air, but in pretaped, edited for. This, frankly, sucks. I’m not the only one who thinks this. A lot of people are annoyed. Most of them, like me, are film lovers and care about the history of the Academy Awards. People like me are being driven away from watching, but I don’t think anybody else is being drawn in.
The Oscars telecast wants viewers. It wants to live in the world where television ratings are still huge. They want to bring in more viewers, and they are aiming for the casual film fan. They want the people who go see the Marvel movies in theaters and watch stuff on Netflix. That’s why the Academy came up with the “popular” movie category, which it quickly nixed. They haven’t nixed excising these categories from the telecast, though.
I don’t think many people are going to tune in because the Oscar for Makeup and Hairstyling isn’t part of the telecast. They fear being “too long” in a world where Marvel movies are almost three hours long, and where college football gets a ton of viewers for four-hour games. The Oscars don’t seem to know what they want to do. If something like Hopkins winning happened in 2022, I won’t be tuned in to find out.
