In the lead-up to Sunday’s 94th Oscars ceremony on ABC, there’s been all kinds of panicked flop sweat about dwindling audience numbers and reversing the trend. The deeper anxiety is that the Oscars are losing their relevance altogether as a must-see event. To which I say: They are and so what?
Nothing stays the same. The movie business itself has changed dramatically: What gets made. What gets the big marketing push. How all of it gets distributed. If the Academy Awards don’t have the cachet they once did, that’s because “the movies” aren’t the shared cultural experience they once were. And if we aren’t collectively watching the same films anymore, outside of a handful of blockbusters, of course interest in the Oscars is going to wane.
Good movies are good movies, regardless of how many people tune in to watch a few statues being handed out. But if we think about the Academy Awards as the elaborate promotional scheme they actually are, then maybe it’s time Hollywood finds other ways to hawk worthy films. For years, Oscar presenters would stand on stage and declare that one billion people worldwide were watching the broadcast. It was never true. But that kind of hyperbole is emblematic of a mindset that insists Hollywood has to be the center of the movie universe. More and more viewers, I suspect, are starting to feel otherwise.
