Why do The Oscars suck?

In THE MAGINIFICENT SEVEN, Vin (played by the GOAT Steve McQueen) tells a joke about a guy who decided to jump off a roof. As he fell, the people in the windows he passed could hear him saying “so far, so good… so far, so good…”

I thought of Vin’s joke as I woke up to the news on Monday that the ratings for the 2021 Oscar “show” dropped to 9.8 million… which means more Americans download an average episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast than watched this year’s Oscar telecast.

Ouch…

I know it’s fashionable to say that ratings for the Academy Awards show have been cratering because people are sick of the radical left wing political screeching that is an integral part of the show. But as satisfying as the idea is, I’m going to buck the trend and propose a different, and probably unpopular opinion.

That’s really not it. Overt politics is part of the problem, for sure, but it’s not the biggest part. The bigger problem for the Oscars is how the underlying political views of the show’s Producers and the Movie Business as a whole have radically altered what the show is meant to be, and how its original purpose has been transformed into something that is not just uncommercial, but anti-commercial.

from 40 million to 25 million to 9.8 million in less than a decade is not just the ratings cratering, that’s the ratings marching off a cliff and shouting “YOLO!” on the way down. It suggests that a buttload of people have simply stopped watching the show. (NOTE: “buttload” is an industry term)

As much as Conservatives would love to claim credit for that, it’s just not possible. I don’t believe there were that many Conservatives watching the Oscars in the first place, but certainly not enough to account for that level of audience erosion.

No, the Oscar’s biggest problem is that it’s no longer a Pop Culture event… at some point in the last ten years, it morphed into an Indie Culture Event consumed by a smaller and smaller number of independent film and fashion fans. Check the ratings for the Independent Spirit Awards, back when that was a thing, and you’ll get a glimpse into the future of Oscar ratings.

What’s the difference between a pop culture event and an indie culture event? The Super Bowl is a pop culture event in that almost everyone watches it, even people who don’t care about sports, because it’s really more about a shared American experience… something we all instinctively want to be a part of. The Oscars used to be that way too, folks who only went to the movies occassionally still tuned into the Oscars, in part because everyone else was.

But that was back when the Oscars were a celebration of the movies we all watched together, as Americans. Now the ceremony seems more like a commercial for a bunch of movies that no one cared enough to pay to see, but that Hollywood thinks need to be forced upon us because America’s rubes have to be taught a lesson about racism, or sexism, or homophobia or some other damned thing. None of which has anything to do with telling a great universal story in an accessible way.

A decade ago it was not uncommon for me to have seen all the Best Picture nominees long before the finalists were even announced. This year I have seen none of them.

Yes yes, the actual politics at the podium are awful, but they’ve always been that way, even when Oscar ratings were high and the telecast was still a major cultural event. Marlon Brando sent a Native American activist to refuse the Oscar on his behalf all the way back in 1973, and that ridiculous stunt didn’t affect ratings at all. Progressive buillshit has always been baked into the Oscar cake, and that was mostly fine with Oscar audiences, until it wasn’t. So clearly something else is also at work here.

How do I know? Well, again, let’s compare Oscar politics to politics in sports, because progressive nonsense has been infecting sports for a decade as well. Yet Superbowl ratings were only slightly down this season over last year and haven’t changed very much over the last decade. And that’s despite a much larger percentage of the football audience being Conservative and supremely pissed off about politics invading their sports programming. You would expect to see a much bigger ratings hit in football than during a movie awards ceremony if on-air politics was really THE problem. And yet Oscar ratings are cratering while the Superbowl is still going strong.

I think the real problem is that the product the Oscars are selling has been devalued by streaming and the Award itself has been completely decoupled from commercial success. In other words, the show is no longer a celebration of the movies and movie stars that we all saw and loved. And that’s where the politics of Hollywood, the underlying progressive disdain that Hollywood has for its customers, really starts to become a problem… a much bigger problem than the overt political screeching that happens on camera.

Let me ask you a marketing question… do you think that after a company sells you something, a car let’s say, that they leave you alone and never try to market to you again? Of course not. A significant part of any company’s marketing effort is designed to make people who are already customers feel good and smart about their purchases, because they want their customers to become repeat customers.

Well, that’s what the Oscars are supposed to be… a massive commercial for Hollywood’s product. But to do that successfully, they can’t just try to sell people movies they haven’t seen and may not want to see, they also have to congratulate their customers for being so smart that they already “purchased” one of Hollywood’s other products. How do you get a customer to pay for NOMADLAND? Well, in part, you do it by rewarding them for already having paid to see something like TENET. It’s a lot easier to sell large numbers of people on a highly commercial product like TENET than NOMADLAND, so if you make them feel better about their purchase of the former, they are more likely to trust you and make a purchase on the latter.

But long ago, Hollywood stopped thinking of the Oscars as a marketing campaign to make their customers feel good about the movies they love and instead have turned it into something with a much higher degree of difficulty… they’ve decided to focus exclusively on selling a product that customers have already demonstrated that they don’t want to buy.

And this is where politics comes in. Hollywood does this because they believe that there is something wrong with their customers. So, instead of using the telecast to reward customers for their past purchases so they can feel better about making future purchases, Hollywood uses the Oscars to punish its viewers for opinions or behaviors that have nothing to do with buying movie tickets.

That’s just stupid. But then I like to say that Hollywood is the only business in the world that actively hates half of its potential customer base. And that’s how we got to a world where brilliantly made movies that attracted a massive consumer response like THE DARK KNIGHT or THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST get overlooked by Oscar voters. They hate that you loved those movies and they want to punish you for it.

“The beatings will continue until the ratings improve” is not a recipe for success, it’s hubris… and the destruction of 75% of the audience for the Oscars telecast has been the price of that hubris.