2020 Oscar Ratings: Viewership Hits All-Time Low With 23.6 Million – Deadline

[Steve Timko]

https://deadline.com/2020/02/oscar-ratings-new-all-time-low-viewership-1202854581/#utm_medium 

[Kevin M.]

A modest proposal: Stop broadcasting award shows. If you must, maybe a one-hour highlight show with a few speeches and performances? Let the cable channels waste time on the red carpet stuff. 

On Mon, Feb 10, 2020 at 4:56 PM Steve Timko <steve...@gmail.com> wrote:

https://deadline.com/2020/02/oscar-ratings-new-all-time-low-viewership-1202854581/#utm_medium 

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Kevin M. (RPCV)

[PGage]

But why would ABC do that? Even with its drop, the Oscars were the most watched entertainment show since...last years Oscars.

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[Tom Wolper]

On Tue, Feb 11, 2020 at 12:41 AM PGage <pga...@gmail.com> wrote:

But why would ABC do that? Even with its drop, the Oscars were the most watched entertainment show since...last years Oscars.

Selling ad spots generates a ton of revenue for them. As long as that doesn't change ABC will air the show.

[Kevin M.]

I get it. If there’s money to be made, the networks will televise anything. But for 20 years I’ve been burned out on award shows, and I’d like them to end. 

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Kevin M. (RPCV)

[Tom Wolper]

On Tue, Feb 11, 2020 at 11:33 AM Kevin M. <drunkba...@gmail.com> wrote:

I get it. If there’s money to be made, the networks will televise anything. But for 20 years I’ve been burned out on award shows, and I’d like them to end.

Nobody in business keeps their job by walking away from money to be made. Though we don't condescend to each other here with "if you don't like it change the channel," award shows have been dead to me for more than 20 years. I don't watch them, don't care who wins, don't care who hosts, don't care who they're wearing. I just don't feel it's meaningful to wish the networks would stop airing them.

[PGage]

OTOH, I like the Oscars, haven’t missed it in 50 years. Ratings may have gone down this year, but I thought the Show was above average (the moment when Bong name checked Scorsese was a top ten Highlight Acceptance Speech moment, and Joaquin’s cow rape speech was one of the top ten Bizarre Acceptance Speech moment)

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[Tom Wolper]

On Wed, Feb 12, 2020 at 12:12 AM PGage <pga...@gmail.com> wrote:

OTOH, I like the Oscars, haven’t missed it in 50 years. Ratings may have gone down this year, but I thought the Show was above average (the moment when Bong name checked Scorsese was a top ten Highlight Acceptance Speech moment, and Joaquin’s cow rape speech was one of the top ten Bizarre Acceptance Speech moment)

My antipathy for award shows comes from a resistance I developed to hype. In some of my reflective leisure moments I use the infinitive archive of the internet to sample shows, movies, and music I decided I had no use for when they came out. Often the product was fine but the intensity of the hype around it made me resist giving it any real attention. As show business recognizes the awards as a marketing opportunity the shows serve as hype machines.

[PGage]

The Oscars are and always have been almost nothing but hype machines, maybe less so now than at other times in their history.  Of course they are not a very effective or efficient way for either serious or casual consumers of popular entertainment to identify the best films or performances of the year. Every year there are at least as many good or better alternatives not even nominated, and the winners more often than not are determined by factors other than actual quality. 

It is much more a celebration of middle brow popular culture than excellence in film making. But I both enjoy and am interested in middle brow popular culture. I like seeing Tom Hanks and Robert Di Niro, Meryl Streep and Scarlet Johansson. I also like hearing what the set designers and make up artists and documentary short directors have to say when they find themselves with 45 seconds in front of the largest audience in the world. I love films like 1917 and The Two Popes, and am interested in what it means culturally when films like Marriage Story and performances like those given this year by Laura Dern and Jauquin Phoenix, which I found unremarkable and obnoxiously mannered, become fetishized by a large consensus of middle brow cultural tastemakers, and what that might say about the culture, or alternatively about the more mundane dynamics of the film community, which while so visible and influential is in many respects like a convention of insurance (or paper) salesmen.  I grew up in Los Angeles, and while was never part of the film community had friends who were, and had some sense each year of the minor and sometimes major ebbs and flows that echo out of the Oscars each year for famous stars (who often care even more than we might imagine about winning) and minimum wage staffers on various production crews or talent agencies.

I am never put off by how excessive the fashion, fashionable the politics, self-congratulatory and indulgent the speeches or long the show, because that’s what the show is, and if viewers are not into that then they should just get the winners on Twitter and stop complaining. Which is what apparently more and more people are doing (well, they still complain even when they don’t watch the show) hence this thread. But still not enough to stop this from being the most watched TV show of the year.

I also like that this year I guessed 22 of the 24 winners correctly (Damn the Koreans!) and won the pool played in by a group of friends and family every year.

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