Is this the end of the Oscars?

One reason people keep going on and on and on about Will Smith is that entertainment journalists know that the Oscars no longer matter to the public, especially the all-important American TV audience. They are desperate to justify their existence.

Last year the Oscars had their lowest-ever TV ratings. Apologists blamed the abysmal figures on Covid. When Covid’s over, everything will be back to normal, they said. This year, the first post-Covid Oscars and the TV audience was the second lowest ever. Just 15.36 million viewers watched with a rating of 2.9 per cent among adults 18-49.

This isn’t a fluke. The trend has been clear for the past twenty years. In 2014 43.7 million Americans watched the Oscars on TV and it’s been in freefall, year on year, ever since, rising only once in the past nine years. The Oscars have lost two-thirds of their TV audience in less than a decade. Except for last year, the TV audience had never fallen below 20 million viewers. No one would bet on them ever seeing twenty million again.

It’s not just the Oscars. According to Hollywood Reporter, none of the major film award shows “have reached anywhere near the heights of pre-pandemic viewing”.

The Oscars have tinkered desperately with big names to draw in the crowds. Chris Rock was there. Amidst all the flim-flam about that slap, no one on the British media has mentioned that when he presented the Oscars in 2016 the show was watched by nearly 35 million, more than twice Sunday’s audience. The show began with Beyoncé’s remote performance of the “King Richard” track “Be Alive” from a tennis court in Compton.

Only the New York Post called it as it is: “Strike another death knell for the once-almighty ratings grabber. Tinseltown likes to think of itself as the centre of the moral and pop culture universe, but c’mon — that was ridiculous, another slap in the face for what’s supposed to be (but rarely is) ‘Hollywood’s Shining Moment’, with television along for the ride on a gravy train that’s gone off the rails and crashed into a wall of indifference.”

So why have the Oscars lost their audience so dramatically and so quickly? It’s not to do with the hosts. They have pulled out some big names during the last few years including Jimmy Kimmel, Chris Rock, Neil Patrick Harris, Ellen DeGeneres and Seth MacFarlane. Hasn’t helped. Is it because there has been only one Black presenter in the previous twenty years (Whoopi Goldberg in 2002)? This year they tried two Black American presenters and got the second-worst TV ratings in history. Is it because they don’t have enough women presenters, only four in the past twenty years? So, this year they tried three. Terrible figures.

The TV executives have cut some of what they consider the dead wood, the awards for the crafts, going for the big names, focusing on the actors and directors. Hasn’t helped either. Obviously, they have blamed Covid. Irrelevant.

The two main reasons are clear. First, it is a long time since the Oscars were about films that people actually pay to see. Only four of the films nominated for Best Picture made it into the Box Office top 100 in 2021: Dune came 13th, West Side Story 38th (with only $28 million), King Richard 57th (with $15 million) and Belfast 74th (with $7 million). Of course, some of the nominated films were made for TV. Coda, which won Best Picture and was shown on Apple TV+, was streamed in fewer than a million US households. The Power of the Dog, which won Best Director and was shown on Netflix, was streamed in 3.4 million US households.

So, what were the films that people actually paid to see? In 2021 Spider-Man tops the US box office figures with almost $600 million; in 2022, The Batman is first with $332 million and we’re not even in April. But these are exceptions. Look at the figures for 2021 and the most startling statistic is that only five films grossed over $60 million in the US and only the top eleven made over $20 million. The moral is that fewer people are going to the movies and fewer still are going to see movies that get nominated for Oscars.

Why the disconnect between the films that get nominated and the films that most Americans actually go to see? The main reason is that for years the people who vote for the Oscars like liberal art-house movies. In recent years, they have tended to vote for films with black characters (King Richard, Green Book, Black Panther, BlacKkKlansman, If Beale Street Could Talk), gay characters (The Power of the Dog, The Favourite, Bohemian Rhapsody, Dick Cheney’s gay daughter in Vice) and disabilities (Coda won three Academy Awards this year).

By and large, the Oscars have always had a soft spot for middlebrow arthouse movies with liberal politics. Now, however, America has become more polarised politically and culturally. The politics of the Oscars are moving dramatically from political liberalism to gender and identity politics, blacks, gays, women, all those left out or marginalised in traditional Hollywood films. The Oscars are more politically correct than the Democratic National Convention. And like the DNC, lots of ordinary Americans don’t vote for them. They would rather go and see Robert Pattinson (white male) in The Batman or Tom Holland (white male) as Spider-Man.

It’s not that these gender identity films are not good. That is not at issue. What we want, though, is for Black, Hispanic and women directors to break out of the margins and start directing huge box office hits, for all kinds of actors to play lead roles in big-budget films for mainstream audiences, which explains the heat in the debate about whether we will ever have a female or Black James Bond.

But there is another issue. We need to do something about the growing divide between films that win Academy Awards and films that tens of millions pay to watch. This divide reflects a larger cultural and political divide in America and that is what is worrying. The Oscars are becoming irrelevant because two whole traditions of filmmaking — the art house film and the liberal film — are becoming completely peripheral for mainstream audiences and as a result so are the Academy Awards.

This Spring we are going to see the 50th anniversary screening of The Godfather. The Godfather was first released in 1972. It was a highpoint for popular but high-quality films. In 1973 when The Godfather won Best Picture, it was up against Cabaret. The year before, The French Connection won most of the big awards, the year after, The Sting, American Graffiti and Bergman’s Cries and Whispers were all up for Best Picture and Jack Lemmon, Al Pacino, Marlon Brando, Robert Redford and Jack Nicholson were all up for Best Actor. Many will feel nostalgic as they go to see The Godfather on the big screen. Not just for one film, but for a whole era that has gone, and with it the Academy Awards.

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