America is having a moment. In case you missed the high drama of the 2016 election or the ongoing analysis of a great cultural divide in the country pitting the coastal elites against everyone in the middle, the Academy Awards have made an effort to remind you of it. In an announcement on Wednesday, the academy teased that “change is coming” with the addition of a “Popular Film” category and a more compressed three-hour runtime of its award show.
This should come as no surprise.
ABC and the Oscars could only endure headlines reading “all-time low viewership” for the famed film awards so many consecutive years before attempting to adapt. The 2018 awards put the Oscars at 26.5 million viewers, down 19 percent from 2017 and a 39 percent slide from the shows’ most recent high of 43.7 million in 2014. There is a good case to be made both for and against this change coming out of Hollywood. I’m admittingly torn — and you should be too.
[Related: The Oscars better figure out what ‘popular’ means, fast]
The addition of a “Popular Film” category is exactly what you suspect, a chance for “Black Panther” and “Star Wars” films to take home a golden trophy for their mainstream appeal and for ABC to lure in their fans to tune in for big reveal of a winner. In a few years you may be lucky enough to witness an Oscar showdown between “Jumanji 6: Stuck Again In The Jungle” and “Fast & Furious 20.” Is this Hollywood waking up to the inherent problems with their elitist, anti-conservative, marathon-length broadcast of social justice rants — broken up by awards for movies you likely haven’t seen? Or is this a very real sign of the times where everyone gets a trophy, value is attached to profitability, and populism is the name of the game?
It’s definitely not the first option. It is more likely the second. The case against this is simple: “Jumanji” or whatever Marvel movie comes out in a given year don’t deserve the highest award for artistic achievement in film just because it sold a lot of tickets. We don’t know the criteria yet for “Popular Film,” but it’s hard to foresee box office performance not being a big part of it. We should all be concerned about a culture that worships at the throne of mediocrity and popular appeal. That’s pretty much why we have to worry about the rise of socialism with younger generations and have a president now that coasted to victory by turning our political process into a reality show (and governs as such). With all the competition in the marketplace today for audiences’ eyeballs and time, it is understandable that some would groan over “The Shape Of Water” winning Best Picture in 2018, but it was in fact a remarkable movie. Creating new categories for safe, shallow, and focus-group generated entertainment is not the American ideal. We should demand more of our culture than a 30th “Spiderman” reboot.
The case for it is also straightforward. If the goal of the academy is to get “America” to tune in every year, it’s quite clear what they are doing isn’t working with audience expectations in 2018. It may not even be their cringy hosts and winner picks that are cause of the decline. The Olympics and the Super Bowl are facing a similar crisis. This has more to do with competition in entertainment, cord-cutting, and the general modernity than it does the liberal parade of grievances and virtue signaling that is the Oscars.
In a way, the extreme negative reaction to this change highlights just how entrenched the bias towards the status quo has become. For example the HuffPost’s Matthew Jacobs says “the academy’s populist grasp for a phony sense of restored relevance is, frankly, some MAGA bullshit” — as if ABC is required to air a three-hour-long program with an amazing shrinking audience or Hollywood isn’t facing unprecedented disruption from outside competition like Netflix and Amazon. Vox views this decision as rushed, despite four years of industry discussion about the ratings problem and cultural irrelevance of the night’s big winners.
The show is too long. Trimming it to 3 hours is long overdue and let’s face it, syncs up nicely with consumer expectations and diminished attention spans. Some of the awards will not be included in the broadcast, presumably going to an online-only version of the show. No one is really being hurt by this besides a sliver of the most hyper-involved arts critics and enthusiasts in the country. But here lies the conundrum faced by all brands, companies, and institutions in this moment of cultural and technological upheaval.
When you try to make everyone happy, you usually end up with no one being happy. Alienating your core audience to try and bring back in the lost viewers may only worsen the Oscars’ problem. I suspect the Oscars’ declining lack of appeal is a mix of frustration with the one-sided political attacks and the wealth of choices for entertainment that are now available. They could focus on these larger and more challenging issues than giving in to the populist moodswing of the times.
Stephen Kent (@Stephen_Kent89) is the spokesperson for Young Voices and host of Beltway Banthas, a Star Wars & politics podcast in Washington, D.C.
