The Oscars broadcast has lost tens of millions of viewers in recent years. The ceremony doesn’t do enough to recognize the best in filmed entertainment.

Rick Dalton, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood. SOURCE: ElectricBoogaloo72, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

One of my favorite scenes in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time In Hollywood is when former TV star actor Rick Dalton — played by Leonardo DiCaprio — has an emotional breakdown in the parking lot of a fancy Hollywood restaurant after realizing that his dream of becoming a movie star is over.

A reassuring friend in Cliff Booth — played by Brad Pitt — drives them both out of the lot in a yellow 1966 Cadillac Coupe de Ville as Dalton launches into a profanity-laced tirade about how nobody knows who he is anymore.

On February 9, 2020 — just weeks before the Covid-19 pandemic would engulf the U.S. and shut down movie theaters indefinitely — the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood hosted a packed house for the 92nd Academy Awards. At the end of the night, Parasite, one of the favorites, won Best Picture.

Parasite was a great movie. As were the other nominees, including Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.

However, I was a little disappointed that Once Upon a Time in Hollywood did not win. Tarantino has said that he is probably done directing movies.

For Tarantino, a Best Picture win would have been a great bookend to an emblematic filmmaking career.

And for the Academy itself — I felt this in 2020 and I’m even more certain of it now — a Best Picture win for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood would have been an appropriate bookend to the Academy Awards itself and the esteemed world of prestigious theatrical filmmaking in general.

Rick Dalton — the main character in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood — personifies what the Academy Awards has become: increasingly irrelevant.

TV ratings for the 2020 Oscars were the worst in history at the time. The broadcast attracted 24 million viewers, which was six million fewer than the year before, and nearly 20 million fewer than in 2014.

In 2021, when everybody was locked at home due to Covid-19, a slimmed down Oscars set a new record low by attracting just 10 million viewers.

Why are fewer people watching the Oscars?

Maybe people prefer to pull up highlight clips of the Oscars on social media instead of watching a three-hour broadcast.

Maybe people just don’t care as much about prestige filmmaking anymore.

Or maybe the nominated films just don’t have enough of a fan base because high quality entertainment isn’t just in movie theaters anymore — it’s on our televisions and smartphones as well.

I suspect it’s a combination of all three.

SOURCE: Thomas Wolf, www.foto-tw.de, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Competition

Even before the pandemic and its theater shutdowns, the entertainment industry was being disrupted.

Netflix began producing its own shows/movies in 2013. And now competitors, including Disney, are producing more original programming to keep up with Netflix.

For the typical consumer, it was overwhelming to keep up with streaming options just a few years ago, and today it’s downright impossible unless you watch shows/movies for a living.

And this is just streaming of traditionally scripted Hollywood shows/movies we’re talking about. There is a wide variety of quality media produced outside of Hollywood to consume my time.

I could easily spend the next year watching televised sports, watching YouTube videos, watching TikTok videos, perusing videos/pics on Instagram, playing video games, watching others play video games, getting sucked into the AnimalsBeingBros subreddit on Reddit, trolling the Cleveland Browns on Twitter, listening to podcasts, and maybe reading a book or two per month without ever considering watching a show or a movie.

In short, I have more media options than ever.

But I don’t have more time to consume them all.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the influx of media options in the last decade has coincided with fewer people watching the Academy Awards.

Fewer people watch the Oscars because fewer people care about the movies being nominated. Something better has replaced watching prestigious films for many. And I don’t see that trend reversing any time soon, if ever.

SOURCE: Kal242382, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

What Is A Movie?

Which brings us back to Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.

The story takes place in 1969, a year in which Hollywood was on the precipice of change as a decade riddled with Westerns and mostly shitty studio movies would be supplanted by the 1970s, considered by some to be the greatest decade of filmmaking in history. The late 1960s marked the end of an era, not just for Rick Dalton but for Hollywood as well.

And we’re seeing the end of an era in Hollywood today. Only, the changes are much more severe, much more pronounced.

It’s not that one movie genre is being replaced by a more popular genre or by some new wave of cinematic creativity like in the 1970s. The change is being driven by technology and the ability for entertainment companies to stream shows and movies directly to us.

In 2021, a record 559 original scripted series aired, nearly double the number of scripted series that aired in 2012. One byproduct of this is that the quality of TV — traditionally considered an artistic backwater compared to movies — is often as good or better than movies.

The quality of TV has improved so dramatically that former Disney CEO Bob Iger recently acknowledged that many TV shows are in fact movies because they are of such high quality.

“The movie business as before is finished and will never come back,” Barry Diller, former CEO of both Paramount and 20th Century Fox, said in 2021. “The definition of ‘movie’ is in such transition, it doesn’t mean anything anymore.”

In the last decade, Academy Awards viewership peaked at 43 million in 2014, the year Ellen Degeneres hosted the show. This was the biggest audience since 2004, when the final movie in the Lord of the Rings trilogy swept the awards.

The biggest TV audience in Academy history came in 1998 with 55 million viewers thanks in part to Titanic, at the time the highest grossing film in history.

SOURCE: https://nofilmschool.com/Oscar-ratings-all-time-low with data from Nielsen and Statista.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Oscars viewership consistently topped 40 million per year. However, Oscars viewership since then has declined as the U.S. population has grown.

In 1985, the population of the U.S. was 240 million. Today, it’s nearly 335 million, an increase of 40%. Had viewership kept pace with U.S. population growth over the last 35–40 years, the Academy Awards in recent years would have attracted an audience of more than 50 million.

Other awards shows have seen similar declines in viewership. And while it could be that media consumption habits have changed — i.e. more of us are simply watching awards show clips online instead of the broadcasts — I’m not so sure when it comes to the Academy Awards.

If TV is now as good or better than movies, what makes movies special anymore?

If movies are TV and TV is movies, why do the Academy Awards — which recognize theatrically released films only — still exist?

Well, one reason is money.

Despite plummeting ratings in recent years, the show has still remained one of the most-viewed live broadcasts on television. This was not true in 2021 when the audience size plummeted to 10 million viewers.

But it was true in 2020, when the then-lowest-rated Oscars broadcast in history was still the eighth most watched live broadcast in the U.S. that year. Broadcasts that attract large audiences are advertising gold.

And I suppose a second reason the Academy Awards exists in its current form is due to nostalgia and tradition.

A movie is required to have at least a limited theatrical release in order to be eligible for Academy Awards nominations. That rule was suspended in 2021 and 2022 due to movie theaters being closed because of the pandemic.

But moving forward, it is fair to question why this rule should exist at all anymore.

One of the most Oscar-worthy movies I’ve seen in the last five years was Chernobyl. Except, it wasn’t technically a “movie.” It was a miniseries on HBO. It was “TV” and there was no theatrical release, hence it was not eligible for an Academy Award.

There is arguably a long list of TV stories — both series and miniseries — in recent years that have been worthy of Academy-level recognition, including Succession, The Queen’s Gambit, Game of Thrones, Watchmen, Atlanta, The Crown, When They See Us, Mare of Easttown, The Underground Railroad, The Chair, Maid, I May Destroy You, Breaking Bad, Godless, True Detective, Downton Abbey, Fleabag, Fargo, Mad Men, The Handmaid’s Tale, Mrs. America, Mr. Robot, Big Little Lies, The Deuce, The Great, Killing Eve, Better Call Saul, Mindhunter, etc.

2022 Best Picture Nominees

Movie theaters began to reopen in Spring 2021. While some of the 2022 Best Picture nominees were not released theatrically in 2021, many were.

And while the pandemic may have played a role in delaying or canceling theatrical distribution of some prestige films, the pandemic did not hurt theatrical distribution and attendance of mainstream commercial movies in late 2021, notably Spider-Man: No Way Home.

Spider-Man was released in theaters in December 2021 — a time of year typically reserved for prestige film theatrical runs — and has grossed $786 million in the US and nearly $2 billion worldwide as of early March 2022.

I added up the box office totals for 2022’s 10 Best Picture nominees based on early March 2022 data from Box Office Mojo.

Combined, these 10 nominees grossed less than $200 million in the U.S. and $620 million worldwide. This includes Dune, which cost $165 million to make and barely scraped past $100 million in the U.S.

These 10 nominated films combined made 75% less money at the U.S. box office than Spider-Man. Worldwide, these 10 films made 67% less money than Spider-Man.

As I scrolled through the list of 2022 Best Picture nominees, I had only heard of a few of them. None of the movies have been buzz-worthy, none of them are commercial successes, none have attracted a huge fan base — except maybe Dune — and only a few of them have recognizable actors in them.

Actor Matthew McConaughey at the 83rd Academy Awards. SOURCE: David Torcivia, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Popularity & Movie Stars

If we go back through the most popular Academy Awards broadcasts over the last 20+ years — 2014, 2004, 1998 — one thing they have in common is an abundance of popular movies and stars.

For 2014, we had a likable host — at the time, at least — in Ellen DeGeneres. And seven of the nine Best Picture nominees were arguably star-driven movies or commercial successes with big fan bases. Matthew McConaughey ended up winning Best Actor for a movie many people had not seen, but who in the hell doesn’t know who Matthew McConaughey is?

The 2004 Academy Awards bestowed multiple trophies on the third and final installment of The Lord of The Rings — a commercially successful movie franchise — that had formidable Best Picture competitors that included movie stars.

And the 1998 Academy Awards — the most watched Oscars broadcast ever — named Titanic Best Picture. At the time, Titanic was the most successful film commercially in history and turned Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet into movie stars. The 1998 Oscars also included multiple other established movie stars — and new stars like Matt Damon and Ben Affleck — in popular movies.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the decline in popularity of the Academy Awards in recent years is correlated with the decline in popular/star-driven movies being made/nominated for awards.

This brings up another issue with the new Hollywood ecosystem: it’s not creating movie stars.

From a writer’s perspective, it makes more financial and creative sense to focus on TV instead of movies. If the best content being created isn’t in movie theaters, and a lot more of this content exists, it is difficult for any one up-and-coming actor to stand out among other actors in a sea of ever-growing content.

This has been compounded by the fact that anybody can become a celebrity now, which devalues the prestige that comes with being a celebrity actor.

Thanks to streaming, there are so many scripted forms of entertainment to watch now, none of it feels special in the way that star-driven theatrical movie hits of the past felt special. In a new world where the writer is king, it feels like this has come at the expense of the movie star.

To be fair, it could be argued that the decline of movie stars had started before streaming — that the immense commercial success of tentpole franchise movies regardless of actors cast in such movies had been minimizing the importance of movie stars for years.

The future of theatrical movies appears to be committed to blockbuster movies that can produce billions of dollars in global ticket sales, something the common prestige film cannot do.

With an abundance of quality streaming options at home, it doesn’t make any sense to pay for a movie theater ticket unless I’m getting an experience — the latest special effects, amazing sound — that has been produced to blow me away in the theater.

There are “movie theater” movies like Spider-Man and there is everything else. And in most cases, a “movie theater” movie ain’t an Oscar movie.

Donna Reed and Frank Sinatra hold their gold-plated Oscars at the 26th Academy Awards ceremony held on March 25, 1954. SOURCE: English: Per a stamp on the reverse side: “Copyright 1954 Columbia Records Corp.” Photographer uncredited and unknown., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The Future

The entertainment world has changed dramatically but the Academy Awards eligibility criteria have not evolved to reflect this.

Maybe a new form of Oscars that recognizes the best filmed entertainment — theatrically released movies AND streamed shows/movies with no theatrical release — would make the most sense moving forward.

But even if the Oscars did expand its scope into recognizing TV, that new version may never feel as special or as prestigious as Academy Awards ceremonies have felt in the past.

The dearth of quality viewing options in the past made the Oscars feel culturally relevant and important. Being nominated for an Academy Award in the past was prestigious — it mattered.

I don’t think it matters as much anymore.

While I don’t expect the 2022 Academy Awards broadcast on March 27 to do as poorly as the 2021 ceremony, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it do worse than the 2020 audience of 24 million.

It will be interesting to see how the Academy adapts if viewership continues to shrink. It has made some changes to 2022’s broadcast format, but I don’t believe these changes address the core issues impacting the ceremony: none of the nominated films were popular nor do many of them contain movie stars to make the ceremony buzz-worthy.

We have more things to watch than ever. We’re watching the Oscars less and less. It may be time for the Academy to consider making changes to the types of filmed stories it honors and how it honors those stories.