So, the report is out and the ratings for the 80th Academy Awards were 14% lower than the least-watched ceremony ever and 21% lower than last year’s Oscars. The result is the least watched Oscars ever. The previous record was in 2003 when 33 million viewers tuned in to watch Chicago win Best Picture. 2008’s broadcast came in at 32 million.
These numbers are resulting in everyone and their mother chiming in with suggestions on how to fix the Oscars.
Suggestions range from:
- Make the ceremony shorter.
- Include strange categories, MTV style. “Best nude fight scene, best sex scene, best stunts.”
- Improve the Oscar website and make the presentation more online interactive.
- Limit the number of montages.
- Give people more time to speak.
- Get “South Park” boys, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, to mock the losers.
Let me address these quickly. The suggestion to make the ceremony shorter is worthless, people aren’t tuning in because the show is too long, they aren’t tuning in at all is the point. The suggestion to add fanboy style questions means it would no longer be the Oscars, so that is almost a suggestion to get rid of the idea of Oscars on a whole.
The online aspect of the Oscar presentation is not a problem. I couldn’t believe the number of live Oscar blogs all night long. If people want a place for satire and humor online there are several places to go during the show.
The montage comment pretty much goes hand-in-hand with the length of the ceremony. As for this year’s show the number of montages was a direct result of the Academy not knowing what kind of show they were going to have to put on as a result of the writers’ strike. In this case they spent money on the montages and instead of scrapping them they decided to show them and Jon Stewart rightly made fun of them.
The “give more people time to speak” suggestion means they want to go back to the days where people brought up lists of people to thank, this isn’t going to happen.
Getting the “South Park” boys means once again going MTV style. Once again, I say if you want satire you can find it online. Oh, and as for the fanboy categories, this already happens. JoBlo.com has an exceptional award process called the Golden Schmoes, I think this is the seventh year and they have it nailed. Don’t steal their spotlight.
So, in my estimation we haven’t gotten anywhere. I also believe we aren’t going to ever get anywhere should we continue to try and find ways to “fix” the Oscars. The Oscars aren’t what’s broken.
USA Today posted an article asking “How would you fix the Oscars?” polling readers and getting their opinions. One comment stuck out from Michael Aleprete from Pittsburgh:
Hollywood has to go back to honoring the big studio movies. These independent films just don’t have the mass appeal of a Titanic, Gladiator, Gone With the Wind or Braveheart. Nobody wants to root for No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood.”
This is the comment studios (yeah, studios, not the Academy) should be focusing on. The reason people don’t want to root for No Country for Old Men and There Will be Blood is because people haven’t seen these films, and it’s not their fault. Let’s take a look at theater counts for the Best Picture nominees really quickly:
- Juno – 2,534 theaters (opened in 7 theaters)
- No Country for Old Men – 1,348 theaters (opened in 28 theaters)
- Atonement – 1,400 theaters (opened in 32 theaters)
- Michael Clayton – 2,585 theaters (opened in 2,511 theaters)
- There Will be Blood – 1,620 theaters (opened in 2 theaters)
The end theater counts don’t look too bad do they, but notice the opening weekend numbers. Yeah, word-of-mouth steamrolled Juno to $131 million, but a love for one film wasn’t going to prompt folks to tune in. People need to root for a film over another. Who is going to root for a film when they can’t necessarily say it is better than the other four nominees. On top of that, Juno is out of the norm. Films don’t traditionally catch wildfire like it did. Even films such as No Country for Old Men, a film that had fantastic word-of-mouth and hardly any negative sentiment thrown its way, only mustered half of Juno‘s take with $64.9 million. Michael Clayton was the worst performing of the bunch after being was released in the largest number of theaters, managing $48 million putting it just slightly ahead of last place There Will be Blood.
Also, people go see movies on opening weekend, this is becoming the way of the industry. So, what does a studio expect to accomplish with a slow roll out when their films will ultimately be lost amidst the advertising for the three other new films coming out that weekend? This fact pretty much negates growing theater counts over time, at least if you are looking to get the largest audiences possible.
What is my point here? My point is marketing. My point is exposure. It isn’t that people don’t want to see these films. It’s that people can’t see these films. On top of the fact that these movies don’t get released in all markets, once they actually arrive in Iowa they aren’t even marketed. The only people that end up going and seeing it are folks that visit online movie sites such as RopeofSilicon and hear the buzz or if they hear about them from a friend. Just imagine if there were as many commercials for No Country for Old Men as there had been for Vantage Point. Now that would be the day.
It no longer pays to put a commercial on television with the words “7 Oscar Nominations”, at least not when the film hits DVD in a couple of months. People didn’t go see Juno because it received four Oscar nominations. People went to see Juno because their friends saw it and thought it was funny. People were dying to see Juno because they heard it was funny. For the longest time I had to field emails asking me when Juno was going to finally come to their town. Unfortunately there was no answer at the time and they were left in the dark.
I have no idea why Focus didn’t release Atonement wide, all it takes is a little marketing. It’s only competition that first weekend was the dead on arrival Golden Compass. And if you are going to try and tell me Miramax and Paramount Vantage couldn’t figure out how to market No Country for Old Men to a wide release audience then you really need to watch that film again. Since when does violence and millions of stolen dollars not bring in audiences? Sure, there is a lot more to No Country than that, but when has that stopped a marketing team from selling people what they want to see and giving them something completely different?
I was asked today if the Oscars are now just a tool to sell DVDs. It is starting to look that way isn’t it? No Country for Old Men was the front-runner going into the Oscars and it came out on top. Oh, and look, it hits DVD in two weeks. Juno is still raking in dough at the box-office but it will hit DVD in mid-April along with There Will be Blood.
Perhaps the Oscars simply are a DVD selling tool, but if studios wised up and if the Academy wants to put on a show that is going to be watched by more people they better start getting audiences to see these movies in theaters and not with some all-day ruse to get folks to watch all five Best Picture nominees in one day just prior to the show. Whoever decided they were going to waste their money on 15 hours of straight movie watching really needs to think that one over a second time.
So, if you want to fix the Oscars then fix the marketing of the films dubbed “the best”. Sure, people want to see things explode, robots take over the world and monsters attack New York City, but people will also go see beautifully drawn out love stories, relevant legal thrillers, violent chases and pregnant teens if you sell it to them. (I intentionally left out diseased oil tycoons because I don’t think There Will be Blood could have brought in more folks had the studio tried.)
If these films truly are the best of the best people will want to go see them. Ladies will drag their men to Atonement, date night is made for Juno and the fellas can go see No Country for Old Men and maybe convince their women to join in. After all, Chigurh is quite the ladies man I understand.
So you see, it isn’t the show that needs fixing, it’s the movies before they get there. Up for Best Picture doesn’t have to be The Incredible Hulk, Cloverfield, The Dark Knight, Iron Man and Kung Fu Panda (even though that would certainly bring in the younger crowd). The key is to simply give people something to cheer for. People would have cheered on No Country had they seen the other four films. Perhaps women would have wanted Atonement or Juno to take the top prize after enduring the violence of No Country and the somber nature of There Will be Blood. Either way, if they had been given the chance to see the films and they had been marketed outside of the art house audience, I really think you would see a ratings bump.
However, we know this will never happen. I mean, how good can a movie really be if the general audience actually likes it? Speaking of which, it wouldn’t actually kill the Academy to just once recognize one of these summer blockbusters as an actual good film.
