Re: Bad Ideas Never Die: Eight Awards Bumped from the Oscar Telecast
Posted: Tue Feb 22, 2022 9:03 pm
Okay, I understand, devil's advocacy and all, but...how do you even pretend to think this is reasonable?
Start with, TV ratings are down for everything (even the Olympics), so the trend of recent years isn't an Oscar thing, it's a TV-and-its-place-in-our-mediaverse thing.
All these awards, whose elimination they think will change things, have been given out since the show first hit the air. Why is it NOW a problem, when it wasn't through all those years that ratings were sky-high?
No one liked last year's show, and I haven't heard the remotest suggestion anyone thinks that's something to emulate. Some of last year's limitations were deep-COVID-influenced -- single presenters because they didn't want people in proximity to one another, meaning less humor. But some were just terrible ideas (let's talk about movie memories of tech nominees instead of showing samples of their work), and no one's going to repeat them. And almost anyone has more a sense of humor than, apparently, Steven Soderbergh, so comedy -- which seemed unofficially banned last year -- will be back.
If they'd bumped only the three shorts categories, there'd have been some grumping -- from the branch, and from the "all awards should be equal" caucus -- but the vast majority of Oscar watchers wouldn't have considered that a full-on assault. Bumping 5 additional categories is overkill (and to include score, in a year when Hans Zimmer and Jonny Greenwood are facing off...)
There's some talk that "edited" versions of the winners' announcements/speeches will be shown. This means either just a snippet -- which is patronizing -- or else one of those-time jump things the Tonys tried one year, which, as Nathan Lane quipped, made the winners look like they were hard of hearing.
And two things about this are just unacceptable:
1) The awards are a road-map -- each one, no matter how minor, is pointing (sometimes misleadingly) toward the bigger results near the end. You could see it in the way the nominations announcements went: everyone gleaning information from the smaller categories as evidence for what would happen in the larger ones.
2) AMPAS wants to sell it as "we'll edit the smaller awards into the show, so you'll still have that". This seems to imagine a world where Twitter doesn't exist. Everyone who seriously follows this will know those 8 winners before the hosts take the stage, and will have filled in a third of their home-ballot before the first on-screen envelope is opened.
How does this not ruin things?
Start with, TV ratings are down for everything (even the Olympics), so the trend of recent years isn't an Oscar thing, it's a TV-and-its-place-in-our-mediaverse thing.
All these awards, whose elimination they think will change things, have been given out since the show first hit the air. Why is it NOW a problem, when it wasn't through all those years that ratings were sky-high?
No one liked last year's show, and I haven't heard the remotest suggestion anyone thinks that's something to emulate. Some of last year's limitations were deep-COVID-influenced -- single presenters because they didn't want people in proximity to one another, meaning less humor. But some were just terrible ideas (let's talk about movie memories of tech nominees instead of showing samples of their work), and no one's going to repeat them. And almost anyone has more a sense of humor than, apparently, Steven Soderbergh, so comedy -- which seemed unofficially banned last year -- will be back.
If they'd bumped only the three shorts categories, there'd have been some grumping -- from the branch, and from the "all awards should be equal" caucus -- but the vast majority of Oscar watchers wouldn't have considered that a full-on assault. Bumping 5 additional categories is overkill (and to include score, in a year when Hans Zimmer and Jonny Greenwood are facing off...)
There's some talk that "edited" versions of the winners' announcements/speeches will be shown. This means either just a snippet -- which is patronizing -- or else one of those-time jump things the Tonys tried one year, which, as Nathan Lane quipped, made the winners look like they were hard of hearing.
And two things about this are just unacceptable:
1) The awards are a road-map -- each one, no matter how minor, is pointing (sometimes misleadingly) toward the bigger results near the end. You could see it in the way the nominations announcements went: everyone gleaning information from the smaller categories as evidence for what would happen in the larger ones.
2) AMPAS wants to sell it as "we'll edit the smaller awards into the show, so you'll still have that". This seems to imagine a world where Twitter doesn't exist. Everyone who seriously follows this will know those 8 winners before the hosts take the stage, and will have filled in a third of their home-ballot before the first on-screen envelope is opened.
How does this not ruin things?