(03-24-2022 12:25 PM)quo vadis Wrote:  

(03-24-2022 12:22 PM)goodknightfl Wrote:  

(03-24-2022 11:15 AM)Minutemen429 Wrote:  Is there a lot of overlap between the audiences? I know I would fall in the group of very interested in the NCAA tournament, no interest in the Oscars.

I kind of agree. Most little old ladies from Pasadena don't watch NCAA and most real folks don't watch Oscar's.

IMO, the reason the Oscars ratings have plunged so much - and they were plunging before the virus hit - is that the producers have moved away from the "little old ladies" and have tried to revamp it for a young, woke audience.

But as sometimes happens with these kinds of moves, you end up really alienating your traditional audience without really capturing the new target audience, and you are kind of sunk.

Not that I'm an expert on TV, LOL. But that's my feeling.

I don't think this is the reason at all.

At the end of the day, people watch the Oscars the most when the movies that they actually care about are competing for the top awards.

Hence, the high water mark of the Oscars in the Titanic year of 1998: that's when the then-highest grossing film of all-time converged with a Best Picture Oscar. The years when blockbusters like Forrest Gump, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Gladiator and Avatar were competing for Best Picture awards also drew massive audiences.

At the same time, there used to be a critical mass of well-watched (if not necessarily blockbuster) mid-budget movies that featured stars and often dominated Oscar categories: think Pulp Fiction, Shawshank Redemption, Jerry Maguire, Good Will Hunting, etc. (Essentially, the old Miramax playbook irrespective of the despicable actions of its leadership off-the-screen.) These weren't film franchises, but they also weren't made for niche audiences. So, people tuned into the Oscars because the stars they loved were up for awards in movies that they actually watched and loved.

For various reasons, the entire industry has changed dramatically since around 2010. Most notably, that category of well-watched mid-budget movies with stars that would be Oscar competitors has totally and *completely* disappeared. It's gone.

Why? Well, we talk about the influence of ESPN/Disney on college sports a lot around here, but it's nowhere near the influence that Disney has had on the entire movie industrial complex. Simply put, in the mid-2000s, Disney make the calculation that if it wanted to *dependably* make money in Hollywood (which is often a boom-and-bust industry with big hits and even bigger misses), then it would need to focus on (a) franchises with wide and deep fan bases that can churn out dependable content for years/decades and (b) movies that can draw audiences worldwide... and specifically in China.

Hence, Disney bought Pixar (where a lot of people may not remember that then-Pixar chair Steve Jobs was ready to cut all ties with Disney until the relationship was salvaged when Bob Iger replaced Michael Eisner), Marvel, Lucasfilm (AKA Star Wars) and Fox essentially one after the other. Disney effectively just turned to a solely blockbuster model... and it completely worked. Disney was making dependable massive profits in a notoriously undependable industry. As with pretty much everything that works, it was copied throughout the entire industry.

It's not an accident that the vast majority of films are now either (1) blockbuster franchises or (2) very low-budget filler movies (which largely consist of horror movies). Those are essentially the only types of films that are profitable anymore.

Those mid-budget Oscar category killers have effectively become extinct in the process. Every once in awhile, you'll see one break through (think Knives Out a few years ago), but they've largely gone the way of the dodo bird.

In the meantime, it's almost as if though the Oscar electorate is actively punishing films for being blockbusters and rarely ever nominate them outside of the technical categories (and even those that get nominated for Best Picture, like Black Panther in 2019, aren't ever serious contenders). Instead, the electorate is nominating truly small niche films that very few people have seen. (Once again, I'm curious if this might start to change as those films have been migrating to streaming particularly in the past year.)

Simply put, the Oscars used to involve a lot of films that a lot of people actually watched and cared about. That often hasn't been the case in recent years, so it shouldn't shock anyone that there has been a decline in viewership. It's not about youth vs. old or political stances (as much as a lot of people seem to want that to be the case).