39.3 million. That’s the number of people who tuned in to watch ABC’s broadcast of the 84th Academy Awards on Feb. 26. Two weeks ago, the Grammys captivated 39.9 million, making history by beating out the Oscars for the first time.
The critical reaction to the Oscars these last few years has consistently been negative, and this year wasn’t expected to be any better. Eddie Murphy dropped out of hosting duties, causing the show’s producers to hand the position to Billy Crystal for the ninth time. It’s true Crystal has proved successful in the past, but many felt the choice a bit bland.
Bland it was. Such a statement is a compliment, for I was expecting boredom or incredulity. In fact, viewership was actually up four percent this year over last.
Themed as a celebration of the history of cinema, the Oscars is supposed to be uplifting. Instead, the nostalgia lent an air of mourning to the proceedings, almost as if the Academy was preparing for the death of the film industry itself.
Indeed, 2011 saw the lowest movie attendance since 1995, and the Academy voters revealed their yearning for the “glory days” of Hollywood in their nominations for Best Picture. All but one of the nine films nominated had its setting in the past. In fact, the two films to garner the most awards Sunday were “Hugo” and “The Artist.” Both films were explicitly about film making in the 1920s and 1930s.
Unwilling to take chances on original film ideas, the studios stick to big-budget spectacles. The endless glut of comic book adaptations and sequels has slowly begun to repel audiences from theaters. Through their increasing dependence on franchise movies they are killing the goose that laid the golden egg.
We live in an era of sensationalism. The Grammys, Emmys, and even the Tonys have fallen under the same spell that turned the Super Bowl from a sporting event into a entertainment behemoth.
The Academy needs to decide what it wants to be — either great entertainment or a source of respectable authority. The Grammys have chosen the first and to great success. The Academy Awards should choose the latter. Meanwhile, the Oscars have disastrously chosen the middle path in an attempt to retain the honor of the award despite lowering class.
Not spectacle-driven enough for the masses and not serious enough for the cinephiles, the ceremonies of recent years only draw viewers through sheer inertia.
For a time, a single popular film was nominated for Best Picture in order to appease the masses. Lately things changed after the outcry following the 2008 ceremony, when the intensely popular “Dark Knight” lost out to the lukewarm “Slumdog Millionaire.”
The Academy resolved to expand the number of possible nominations to 10, and, in the process, cheapened the value of the nomination while simultaneously making it difficult for viewers to attend every film before the awards.
Meanwhile, other critics of the Academy, like myself, lament the lack of ambition in most of the nominated films. Historically the academy has displayed a tendency to award Best Picture to “safe” films such as “The King’s Speech.”
Is the existence of the Academy Awards profitable to the advancement of art and culture? Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued against the existence of such academies, whether they be for the arts or the sciences. In his opinion organizations meant to promote art or science instead tend to stifle creativity. Academies are often dominated by the mediocre men opposed to change.
When choices like this year’s “The Artist” are rewarded in place of wonderfully ambitious films like “The Tree of Life,” I feel as if the Academy is slowly tossing aside its relevance.
hsmith@hillsdale.edu
