Tag: oscars

Good Lord…

Well, that was certainly a thing that happened, apparently.

As usual I didn’t have a strong opinion about the Academy Awards in advance and don’t necessarily have a strong opinion about any of the winners, losers or other events that transpired during last night’s ceremony.

That being said, I do have a number of random thoughts I’m compelled to share.

In no particular order:

Let’s address the elephant in the room and say that “the slap” shouldn’t be that big a deal in the context of the Oscars essentially being a trade industry event. I’m sure if you attended the regional awards conference of insurance sales professionals, more than a few people have been smacked upside the head on stage.

That being said, we shouldn’t be glorifying or ignoring violence.

Nor should we be condoning or glorifying the kind of “punching down” comedy that led to the incident.

That being said, do we need an emergency conversation on how to handle this on the part of the Oscars governors?

This one’s for the entertainment media: Do we need recaps/stories of everyone’s opinion about the incident? Because I don’t think we do. But then again, this is the same group that’s given us approximately 78,649 stories a week about the tragic shooting on the set of a C-grade Alec Baldwin movie, so…

While I didn’t watch the broadcast, it sounds like “the slap” was the most awkward Oscars moment since half the auditorium pointedly refused to clap, much less stand, when Elia Kazan was presented with an honorary Oscar in 1999.

On another topic, if you’re celebrating a 56% rebound in TV ratings from last year’s low that’s still half of what it was two years ago, your yardstick is broken.

The fact that the two weeks leading up to the Oscars was dominated by one hot take after another about whether Netflix would (or deserved to) win its first Best Picture award and then Apple swoops in and nabs the trophy when it’s been producing/distributing original films for like a quarter the time Netflix has is so amusing it’s almost all I’ve been able to think about.

Also, the “Does Netflix deserve to win Best Picture” topic is a subset of the larger “Does Netflix actually make movies if they aren’t shown on a big screen” conversation. Because that larger idea is misguided and somewhat destructive, all fruit from that tree is misguided and unhelpful, so let’s not keep engaging.

Zack Snyder movies winning both of the Pandering categories – Army of the Dead won “Fan Favorite” while Zack Snyder’s Justice League won “Cheer Moment” – is a great moment for all the fans who bullied Warner Bros. for five years and continue to support the director’s Randian incoherence.

Especially since “Sunday” from Tick..Tick..Boom! is approximately 158X more of a “Cheer Moment” not to mention better filmmaking in general.

Those wins will also do nothing to make those fans feel anything less than silenced victims who constantly need to shut down anyone who disagrees with them. I know this from experience.

The very existence of those categories also signals the next step in the Oscar’s slow Dragonball-esque evolution into the MTV Movie Awards, which is interesting to watch.

See also the display of TikTok videos during an Encanto musical performance, which is a variation on the “let’s show Tweets in a chyron” tactic that’s been popular for like a decade or more now.

I mean if you want to rekindle interest in the Oscars broadcast, either go full Super Bowl and make it a two week event that offers something to all audiences at the end or embrace the suck and make it a popularity contest. Just accept the fact the latter means Red Notice 2 will be a serious contender, which changes the tenor of the proceedings.

Of course that’s only if broadcast ratings are a goal you’re chasing.

Which necessitates that at some level you’re looking to judge the value and worth of the movies being made by the size of the audience watching what is, again, a glorified tradeshow.

Which is the opposite of the narrative always spun about the Oscars, which is that it’s about the validation and recognition of your peers.

So which is it: Do you want Sean Penn to love you or do you want 10s of millions of people to watch the show? You can’t have both.

You also can no longer have both “popular TV broadcast” and “very strong opinions about how distribution platforms should define what we decide is award-worthy.”

I mean…OK…

As usual, my thoughts on award nominees are summed up easily as “Sure…fine.” So too with the Academy Award nominations announced earlier this morning.

Such nominations represent a particular cultural snapshot, one filtered through the lens of a group that’s largely unrepresentative of the population as a whole. In that regard, they are similar to the pool of films as a whole, in that the demographic makeup of those that greenlight production is very different from that of the moviegoing public.

That means they’re going to offer some insight into what kind of cultural conversations were happening at the time, but generally only the kinds of conversations you might overhear in an affluent neighborhood’s second most popular Starbucks. Most of the movies nominated will fade from relevance inside of the next six months while some that were “snubbed” will go on to be considered classics for decades.

Thus it has always been and thus it always will be.

More interesting to me at the moment is the coincidental timing of the Oscar nominations coming immediately after what seems to be regarded as an extremely effective and well-produced Grammy awards ceremony.

While I didn’t watch the broadcast, it seems the Grammys were a hit because artists turned in intriguing, relevant and entertaining performances, a good mix of artist genres and demographics and a reminder that, especially this year, it’s important to remember the kinds of people who have born the brunt of the pain related to pandemic closures and shutdowns.

As many other people have pointed out, there’s little that award-giving bodies in music, movies or television can do at this point to turn around the long-running decline in ratings for any awards show. That’s a symptom of not only the often-unrepresentative nature of the items nominated and the media fragmentation that impacts every category.

It’s been over a decade since the Oscars expanded from five to 10 the number of movies that could be nominated for Best Picture, an attempt to offer some room for more commercially popular films to be included, which would hopefully bring in more viewers to the broadcast. No actual problems were solved by this, though, and nominees still tend to be films that only played in limited runs or at least didn’t perform as well as expected.

Perhaps if AMPAS really wanted to make the Oscars more relevant it would heed the results of stories like this pointing out that tens of billions of dollars are being left on the table by studios not producing films featuring more racial and ethnic diversity. If more people felt more movies were made by, for and about people like themselves, then interest in which films are heralded would rise. Or maybe if, just once, the Oscars broadcast itself didn’t feel like an endless self-indulgent slog, more people might choose it over literally anything else.

Using the Grammys as an example, a push at this year’s Oscars to bring the focus to theater employees (not owners or executives) as well as other support personnel would go a long way to making the ceremony more interesting. So would skipping the canned and corny scripted bits that haven’t been fresh since Bob Hope last hosted as well as the rest of the overproduced and overly-long recorded segments.

Stick with concise and respectful presentations of the awards that allow the winners to speak their mind in a reasonable amount of time, performances of the original songs by the artists that recorded them.

Most of all, convey an appreciation of movies from the audience’s point of view, not that of a talent agent or associate producer.

If changes like that – ones that tear the show down to the studs and reimagine the entire structure and flow – aren’t made, then more and more of the public will come to the realization that watching the broadcast is a lot less fun than playing video games, scrolling through TikTok or finishing season 3 of whatever it is they’re watching at the moment.

The reactions to the announcement by The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences it would be adding a “Most Popular” category to its annual Oscars awards ceremony were as pointed as they were swift. Many pointed out that the category was at best ill-defined and seemed to be an overt attempt to halt, if not reverse, years of declining broadcast ratings.

One of the more pervasive themes of the commentary was that if those ratings reflect the popularity/appeal of the nominated films they also reflect the changes that have impacted every aspect of the media world in the last decade. Television viewership is down across the board as it competes against streaming/on-demand video providers, video games, esports and more. To use the popular vernacular, the industry audience has fragmented.

Let’s move past how relegating movies voters would have otherwise dismissed as not being serious enough for consideration in anything more than a few technical categories is more than a little condescending. Instead, let’s look at how what’s “popular” is often determined by, not a result of, access to marketing and distribution resources

Marketing For Opening Weekend

It’s no recent development that studio films live or die according to opening weekend. The entire marketing operation for movies like Black Panther, Mission: Impossible – Fallout, Jurassic World and others are aimed at turning out audiences for that opening frame.

That’s preceded by not only extensive TV and other advertising but also red carpet premieres featuring cars provided by promotional partners, at least one or two cover stories in mass market entertainment media, set visit reports by film writers, a full week of appearances by the cast on “Kimmel” and more. It’s almost impossible to escape these movies, the campaigns for which generate high levels of awareness and create a sense of urgency. If you don’t see it opening weekend, audiences are told, you’ll miss out on the conversations and run the risk of reading a spoiler on Twitter.

Those resources, though, are only available to the biggest studios. Disney could put the Black Panther cast on every magazine cover and TV show in addition to plastering the internet with ads because it’s Disney and has that kind of money. It also knows that media organizations understand there’s more interest in movies like this that are based on known properties and is going to be more than happy to give it whatever time and space might be available.

Bleecker Street couldn’t do the same for Leave No Trace, which saw more press activity after opening weekend than it did prior to release. The one TV spot for that movie has 772,000 YouTube views compared to the “Rise” commercial for Black Panther, which logged 3.5 million views to date.

Distribution’s Thumb On the Scale

Theaters have added more and more screens in recent years involving some combination of IMAX, Dolby, 3D and other premium formats to better present the effects-laden franchise installments studios prefer because of their overseas box-office potential. That’s pushed out or limited the availability of smaller movies, including the kind of $20-40 million budgeted adult dramas that used to make up much of a studio’s release slate.

Consider that Leave No Trace played on just nine screens its first week and topped out at 361 a month after opening, helped along to that point by strong word of mouth and almost universally positive reviews. Black Panther opened on over 4,000 screens and onl dipped below 300 in June, over three months after opening.

That kind of system guarantees a select few films will be immensely popular while others will fade into obscurity despite critical acclaim.

It needs to be asked – and many are doing so – if distribution that insures few people will have access to a movie makes sense in the age of streaming. That the answer is often “no” is why prestige films like last year’s Mudbound and the upcoming Roma are being picked up or produced by Netflix, which allows for instantaneous mass reach independent of proximity to specific theater.

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Netflix?

The issue, then, is that AMPAS has backed itself into a corner.

1. It has to keep supporting the theatrical distribution industry.
2. It also wants to keep recognizing “quality” films, having long ago decided sci-fi/fantasy, comedy and other genres didn’t rise to that level.
3. Those prestige films are either getting limited theatrical releases accompanied by limited marketing campaigns that can’t compete with the paid, owned and earned media carpet-bombing for the next Marvel Cinematic Universe release, or they’re going to Netflix.
4. It’s can’t acknowledge those movies because Point #1.

In a very real way, this is AMPAS and its friends in NATO daring Netflix to either A) break its own model and give its original films a significant theatrical release or B) break precedent and release viewership numbers, something it has not done to date.

It’s worth noting that Netflix does not give its original movies significant marketing pushes. Trailers often arrive just a couple weeks before the movie is available and there’s little to no online support outside of a few ads and maybe a couple posts to the corporate Twitter account. Instead it mostly relies on its internal recommendations and promotions to drive awareness

There are, of course, exceptions to that. Mudbound, Bright and a few others received more extensive campaigns. Set It Up and Like Father have both had earned media efforts featuring the stars and filmmakers. But those are very much the exceptions.

So The Academy wants to throw the masses a bone and say “OK, we’ll grudgingly admit you all liked X even though Y was the true Best Picture” even while it refuses to acknowledge that popularity can no longer be solely measured by box office revenue or ticket sales. Doing so does acknowledge that the serious films often receiving awards have restrictor plates placed on their reach by a system that rewards those with the deepest pockets and the most recognizable IP.

It’s not likely to work, of course. People don’t want to be told that what they like is only worthy of second-tier status. And they will wonder why something like Set It Up isn’t being included. TV ratings likely won’t rebound and the whole operation will continue clinging to diminished relevance because it refuses to take popularity seriously.

Chris Thilk is a freelance writer and content strategist who lives in the Chicago suburbs.