How boring is the celebration when its final and most prestigious award recipient refuses to so much as FaceTime in to thank the guests?
Well, the numbers don’t lie, and evidently, Best Actor dark horse Anthony Hopkins wasn’t the only person to skip out the 93rd Academy Awards.
A year after hitting record-low viewership, Oscars ratings plummeted once again, dropping 58% from last year. Not even 10 million people watched this year’s ceremony. That’s fewer than the number of people who tune into NCIS or FBI: Most Wanted on an average night. Even most of the Democratic primary debates got more viewers.
It ain’t exactly a mystery as to why, and despite what Hollywood wants you to believe, the pandemic is only tangentially to blame.
This should have been the best year ever for the Oscars. People were at home all year with little else to do but Netflix and chill. Never have more people found it easier to watch all of this year’s movies than in 2020.
But the movies that people have seen are so banal.
The Academy nominated films few cared to watch. Nomadland, a film about a widow who loses her job, lives in a van, and poops in a bucket, netted just $1.5 million in profit. The Father, a movie about a man slowly losing his mind to dementia, actually lost money, earning a mere $5.6 million at the box office despite a much bigger budget. And is it any wonder? The Academy always chooses Oscar bait over blockbuster hits thanks to the film industry’s increasing bifurcation into pure fan service for Chinese markets and pretentious exercises in artistic self-gratification. But as Bill Maher quipped, couldn’t Hollywood have put out at least a few films that didn’t make us want to take a bath with a toaster, especially with a pandemic depressing us all?
Furthermore, the ceremony itself has never been more insufferable and boring. They fired Kevin Hart as the host in 2018 for decade-old tweets he had apologized for. Since then, knowing that they had to choose someone totally unproblematic to the woke, and that nobody even slightly entertaining fits that bill, the Academy gave up on hosts altogether.
Thus, in recent years, we were left with a cavalcade of millionaire celebrities opining on how bad the Orange Man is and how amazing, diverse, and liberal they are. Again, this year’s show gave more accolades to Nomadland than any other film while holding the ceremony at a venue where they had to expunge a bunch of homeless people into the streets just to have the event.
Host a show without an actual host while celebrating a bunch of movies nobody watched while the most tone-deaf and privileged people on the planet pretend to give a damn about the actual victims suffering during a pandemic, and yeah, it’s easy to see why everyone with a functioning prefrontal cortex decides to tune out.
