DWilson

I'm surprised this hasn't been suggested before. I kid.
Believe me, if the TV networks could have made this happen we'd have been doing it this way for 60 years.

DaveyJoe

They don't want a brief awards ceremony, that's less advertising revenue.

RichC2

imo, #9 yes, #18 no. The numbers fall off a cliff after #9.

But I guess it doesn't matter that much, 2019 was an improvement over 2018 ratings wise when a $700m domestic grosser, $200m grosser and $189m grosser were among the best pic nominees, but 2018 was more watched than 2020 and that year had nothing even moderately high grossing nominated outside of Dunkirk.

Draven

Because a majority of the public cares more about Brad Pitt than Roger Deakins. If the goal is to get ratings up, they need a tighter show. If they don't care about ratings, then they need to stop acting like they matter.

Of course, but it the ratings continue to slide, they get less money for those ads anyway. They might want to think about a tighter show that they can charge more for.

DaveyJoe

Are the Oscars streamed anywhere? Many millennials and Gen Z folks don't have cable. Older folks who watch a lot of TV probably aren't interested in the Hollywood elite. It seems like maybe the Academy hasn't adapted to changing trends in viewing habits.

Mabuse

As I’ve said in the past, the Oscars is the Super Bowl of awards shows. They set the standard for what an award show can be. Over 50 years ago the Academy made a colossal paradigm shifting move; they stopped being an awards banquet in a hotel ballroom photographed by newsreel reporters, and decided they would instead be a live television show, a pageant of song and dance and laughs and stars. They’ve been doing that template ever since.

It’s time for another paradigm shifting move. The old template is worn out. It’s been copied by every other awards show. What at first was revolutionary is now homogeneous.

I don’t know what that paradigm shift is, but that’s what is needed. A completely new concept.

Count Dooku

They mute the audience microphones, so that the roller coaster effect of the applause is eliminated, but if you hear applause at several points, it is because the sound is so loud from the audience that the stage mics are picking it up. The solution you are looking for is to eliminate applause all together, which will never happen.

Groucho

"Kirk Douglas!" (roaring applause)

"Bob the Grip!" (stifled coughing)

Count Dooku

There are many problems with the Oscars, but I think the two biggest are:

The majority of the winners in the major categories are well-known in advance.
With so many other awards shows happening in January, and the entire concept of "awards season" coverage, if you care about the Oscars, you already know most of the winners. This year Pitt and Phoenix were dead certain locks. Zellweger was a virtual lock, and Dern was the very clear front-runner. And the Best Picture race was down to 1917 versus Parasite. There can always be upsets, but there is very little drama about the winners.

The Academy has spent a decade telling "the masses" that the movies they like are not worth shit.
Seriously, 2009 was the first year with the expanded Best Picture nominees. Look back over all the films nominated since then, 2 or 3 (at most) each year could actually be called popular, and Argo was probably the only winner to have any box office success in the US.

They say that people don't watch the Oscars because they don't have movies they liked to root for, but people watch the Super Bowl even if they don't give a shit about the teams playing, but they still like football. The Oscars are a championship game in a sport that people don't care about.

And so you have a show that tries to please what audience it has by putting as many celebrities in fabulous clothes on its stage as it can, because they know there are people watching who care about that. And there are fewer and fewer old cranks who care that 2020 is the 60th anniversary of the release of Spartacus.

GoldenJCJ

Agreed. I like Gervais for the most part but his I’m over his schtick.

I’ll add Poehler and Fey in the “Tired of their schtick” pile too.

TomOpus

I streamed it on my phone at work. I was able to jumped to an award and skip past stuff I wasn't interested in.

Decker

Do you guys agree with me that the three Shorts awards are not for theatrical motion pictures and nobody gets to see them or even hear about them, and therefor shouldn't be part of the telecast? That would cut the show run time by about 15 minutes.

DWilson

Every year my city's "Art House Cinema" runs the nominated shorts for a week. I'm sure that happens in most major cities.

Mabuse

Over the years there have been differing efforts to allow audiences to see the shorts. I recall that around 1999 PBS showed them all in advance of the Oscars. Didn’t one of the streaming services have them all a few years ago?

I like the “lesser” awards. Those are the people who the award really means the most to.

sauce07

How I'd "fix" the Oscars

• Don't worry about the casual audience, embrace the core. I look forward to the Oscars every year, I don't want this event to fly by. Make it longer, add more categories (Stunts, Casting, Ensemble, New Comer)
• Have a host, let them host. I feel like when they did have a host, they'd be around for the first 30 minutes then disappear for a while. They should introduce presenters, throw to commercials, keep the flow.
• Less music, this isn't the Grammys
• Bring back the lifetime achievement award. I like seeing legends, especially those that didn't get recognized in their time.
• Award presenters should be comedians or classic movie pairings reunited
• Purge the voter roll. You have to show up to a certain amount of screenings in person in order to vote, you lose your membership after X years if you are not active in the industry.
• Countdown to best picture. If there's 9 nominees, at the beginning of the telecast #9 is revealed, and so on till we have a winner. Embrace that even the #9 movie was nominated for best pic, you didn't lose, you just didn't win.
• Make it "Hollywood's biggest night" for the fans at home, show off new trailers for big upcoming movies during the commercial breaks

DaveyJoe

Count Dooku

There is a tension in the production between the idea that this is an industry awards show and the TV viewers are just being invited to watch the proceedings, and the competing idea that this is simply the production of a TV show.

They give out 84 Grammys, but just about a dozen categories are awarded during the three hour broadcast. The point is to just get the biggest stars in the biggest categories, and to demonstrate some diversity of genres, and then pack the show with a lot of live performances.

Personally, I think that the more the Oscars embrace more stars and fewer categories, the more they just become on a par with the Globes, the SAGs, and the Critics' Choice.

Stay true to yourself, Oscar, and people can't appreciate you for what you are, to hell with them!

Count Dooku

It's on TV. If you have a TV, you can turn it on and watch the Oscars.

clckworang

I agree that it could be cool to have some additional categories, like stunt work. I really miss the lifetime achievement award as well. I always looked forward to those.

This show was just odd. There's not much else I can think to add to it. I was shocked that Parasite did so well. When it won for screenplay, I started to wonder if it might go on to win best picture, but I still didn't give it much chance. Nice surprise.

Ash Ketchum

I think they should be scrapped entirely or confined to their own event somewhere, like part of an ongoing film festival or something. Nobody watching at home cares about these awards and the winning filmmakers are usually incredibly annoying. I would also scrap the documentary feature category, unless it's a year with enough feature documentaries that have played theaters and gotten some critical acclaim. Otherwise, don't bother. Or maybe have an Honorary Oscar for one documentary feature, which is the way it used to be with foreign language films. In the early 1950s, foreign language wasn't a competitive category but a single award bestowed on one film. The honoree was usually Japanese (RASHOMON, GATE OF HELL, SAMURAI 1, etc.), so there must have been some pressure to make it a competitive category so other countries could get in on it, since the postwar era saw a flood of foreign films hit the U.S. market.

The only reason the documentary, animated and short categories were originally part of the Academy Awards was because the major studios back then all produced shorts, cartoons and documentaries as part of their regular output and it was a good way to market and promote the best of these. Once the studios stopped producing them (roughly the 1960s), the categories should have been dropped, but by then there was a substantial nontheatrical market for 16mm films (schools, universities, libraries, churches) being filled by numerous independent animators, creative filmmakers and documentarians (think Maysles brothers, Drew Associates, National Film Board of Canada), that Academy voters turned to those films for inclusion in these categories.

Drexl

I like most of these. Another suggestion: move it back to March, to give the voters more time to think about their ballots and see more of the films. Early February seems too soon.

Count Dooku

The more time you put between the critics' "best of" lists, the various Guild awards, the Globes, and the SAGs, the more time you are giving for opinions to be affected by group-think, and the obvious-ness of the winners will just get worse than it already is, and then by the time the Oscars are presented, the whole thing seems like an after thought, and the public's attention will have moved on.
Except for the Globes, which were presented in the middle of the Oscar nomination window, the window closed before any other awards or nominations were public, which I think made the voters more self-reliant.

JeffTheAlpaca

Agree who was the genius that thought the show airing one week after the Super Bowl was a good idea?

Maybe some people did not want to watch a 3 hr plus event on a Sunday in back to back weeks?

I watched it after 8pm since 5pm is too early and weird to watch a show like that with the sun still out.

Why did they remove the lifetime achievement award from the broadcast?

The Golden Gloves cover both TV and movies so most of the awards are the major awards most people care about in a 3 hr block

Cellar Door

I agree with this. So many of the 'Oscar bait' movies are released late in the year, and I generally wait for stuff to be available to rent on Amazon or VUDU. It would be nice to have a chance to see more of the nominated movies and performances before the ceremony.

GoldenJCJ

I like a lot of these. I’m not sure about counting down to BP but it’s not the worst idea I’ve ever heard.

I’d also add to get rid of filler nonsense throughout the show. No one cares about terribly written comedy from presenters or throwing it to nobodies for a useless bit. Instead I’d like to see them embrace awards that get less attention. We don’t need to see technical Oscars awarded and boring Speeches given for those awards but I would love to see a fun 2-3 minute film school on what those awards are, what makes them so great on those movies, and showing montage examples of what makes those professions so important to films.