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They have no one but themselves to blame.
It's early December, also known as awards-season crunch time, and Hollywoodites are all flapping their inflated lips about the worrying state of the Oscars, how it looks like the Academy Award nominations will be rife with smaller and independent movies – box-office no-shows – and how that will result in teeny-tiny TV ratings on Oscar night.
The folks at ABC, who have committed to broadcasting the show in the United States through 2014, are still sobbing about last year's telecast; it drew 32 million viewers and was the least-watched on record. They see a direct correlation between box office and Oscar viewers. That is, if people didn't care enough to go see such nominees as Away from Her, The Savages, In the Valley of Elah, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, I'm Not There and Gone Baby Gone – which together grossed a measly $48-million – they won't care enough to tune into a show that lauds them. Last year's best-picture winner, No Country for Old Men, made $74-million – a respectable number, but hardly a whopper. The box-office champ of the 2007 telecast, Juno, earned only $143-million.
Instead, ABC yearns for a nominee like Titanic, which grossed more than $600-million and helped attract the most-watched Oscar show ever. They're crossing their pedicured toes in hopes that The Dark Knight ($530.3-million gross) and Wall-E ($223.6-million) might cadge some ratings-boosting nominations.
But they don't expect many. Here's why: First, the makeup of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has changed. In 2004, officials revised the admissions policy, trimming the number of invitees because they thought it was getting too big (membership is now 5,810). The effects of that five-year-old policy are really being felt, according to a piece this week in The New York Times: There are fewer actors (traditionally the largest and most powerful branch) and more indie-film and international members, such as Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, who directed The Lives of Others to a best-foreign-film Oscar.
In fact, about a quarter of the 115 new members invited in 2007 come from the international and indie worlds. For example, Adriana Barraza, Oscar-nominated for playing a Mexican nanny in Babel, got invited to join the academy last year, while more well-known (and box-office-friendly) North American nominees such as Casey Affleck (for The Assassination of Jesse Jame s by the Coward Robert Ford), Amy Ryan (for Gone Baby Gone) and Ellen Page (for Juno) did not. These indie and international members tend to nominate films like their own – smart, worthy, but hardly boffo.
Second, with a couple of exceptions, the studios' Oscar-calibre pictures are perceived as downers or misfires. Blindness, Body of Lies, Brideshead Revisited, Changeling, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Duchess, Miracle at St. Anna, Revolutionary Road and W. all had heat until people actually saw them.
And third, the pictures that are successful artistically are often tough sells at the multiplex. In Doubt, a nun accuses a priest of sexual misconduct. Frost/Nixon is a 30-year-old story about crusading journalists. Milk is a biopic about an assassinated gay politician. In The Reader, a woman is revealed to have been a guard at Auschwitz. Valkyrie has to contend with a backlash against its star, Tom Cruise. Slumdog Millionaire features a cast of unknown Anglo-Indians. The Wrestler features Mickey Rourke's face. Beehives full of early buzz for The Visitor, Rachel Getting Married and I've Loved You So Long haven't boosted their paltry grosses of $9.4-million, $8.8-million and $1.5-million, respectively.
Those are the official reasons for the Oscars' waning glitter. But the real fault, as I wrote in my first line, lies with the Hollywood entertainment machine itself. Studios make a couple of prestige pictures a year, and they're very respectable and all that. But for many years now, Hollywood has chosen grosses over quality. It has courted an audience of 14-year-old boys with either explosion-and-chase movies or giggly smut, and abandoned thoughtful adults who want narrative and character. They throw humongous marketing budgets at loud, kinetic crap with paint-by-number scripts, which are edited as if everyone has attention-deficit disorder, but spend pennies promoting their art.
And they've been hugely successful. The top-grossing four films of 2008, The Dark Knight, Iron Man, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and Hancock – all comic-book films, take note – earned nearly $1.4-billion. But with the exception of the animated children's movies Wall-E and Kung-Fu Panda, and the late Heath Ledger's turn as the Joker in The Dark Knight, the most financially successful film that seems remotely like an Oscar contender, Changeling, languishes on the box-office list at number 70.
So, by December, when studios haul out their obligatory A-list material, is it any wonder that no one's interested? And how can they expect this audience of hopped-up kids – the audience they created and courted – to sit through a three-hour Oscar telecast that lauds writers, cinematographers and films with subtitles? How can they expect disgruntled adults – the audience they sidelined all year – to suddenly care?
The plans being bandied about to pull in viewers for the Academy Awards are not just desperate and pathetic, they're completely wrong-headed. Concentrate on box-office champs, whether they're nominated or not! Recruit a load of minxy presenters! Bleah. No kid is going to wade through the documentary shorts just to get a peek at Jessica Alba.
I see the same sort of nonsense all over the media – at the CBC and other networks, in newspapers and magazines. The powers that be are abandoning their real audience (thoughtful adults) to court, wrong-headedly, a youth audience that does not exist. You won't make an Internet-loving twentysomething into a newspaper reader by putting Ashlee Simpson on A-1, but you will alienate your real audience in the process.
If ABC and the academy want a bigger, younger audience on Oscar night, they've got to beg studios to make more intelligent movies with broader appeal, and to promote them with as much largesse as they throw at Four Christmases (last week's box-office champ – a slice of preachy fruitcake that no one should be proud of). If it makes no economic sense to do that, then just give us a dignified Oscar show that will appeal to cinephiles. Putting lipstick on a pig didn't work for John McCain, nor will it work for the Oscars.