The Oscars just confirmed their own demise

Earlier today, the Academy Awards announced over Twitter (ala every major news story or presidential outburst of 2018) that next year's ceremony would see the introduction of a new award's category "designed around achievement in popular film," along with the news that the announcement of a number of awards would be made during commercial breaks (to ensure the telecast reached a three hour runtime.)

At the same time this news broke, the internet erupted in a merciless stream of mirth and outrage. Accusations of pandering and snobbery flew left and right, resulting in what could arguably be the most attention directed towards the Oscars in years.

For me, the two key issues that today's announcement highlighted were 1. the increasing irrelevancy of the Academy and 2. the embarrassing self-aggrandisement of the annual ceremony as a whole.

To illustrate the first point, lets take for starters the fact that this year's ceremony was the lowest watched in history, with the 26.5 million viewer figure signalling a drop of 19% from 2017. Of course, you could argue that this was partly due to the increasing irrelevancy of the live TV format, particularly for an event so largely "uneventful" as an awards show. Therefore, the biggest indicator of the shrinking significance of the Oscars is the box office figures of the nominated films. 

If we take this Economist graph from 2012, we can see the significant impact that the Awards had on the performance of each film back in that year, with The Artist (the best picture of that year) receiving a 67% performance boost following its nominations. Other years showed a similar correlation, with The King's Speech (2011's best picture winner) receiving a 57% boost.

Now, compare this to the performance of 2018's bunch of nominees and the figures reveal a damning story. In fact, this year saw the lowest financially performing set of best picture nominated films since 2011, with only two nominees reaching the $100 million mark in the US (Get Out and Dunkirk). This, coupled with the fact that last year's winner Moonlight was the second lowest performing best picture winner in history, is highly concerning news for the Oscars and their desire to remain in the cultural spotlight. The graph below, published by Variety, tells us all we need to know about the rapidly increasingly lack of impact held by the Academy. 

Of course, the other issue is that the unveiling of this new "popular films" category threatens to create a huge division within the film industry as a whole. Films that perform well at the box office appear to have been definitively shunned and segregated with today's news, a move that signals increasing snobbery and elitism among Academy members. The other side of the argument, one which I am just as sympathetic to, is that through the introduction of this new category, the Academy is displaying a fine example of grade A pandering. Diluting their core aim of awarding the very best achievements in film is a dangerous and highly divisive move and has already struck a nerve, as evidenced in the tweets above. 

Personally, this move just appears to be more evidence of the Academy's swiftly sinking ship, with the awards ceremony increasingly buried under an avalanche of accusations and controversy. One of my major issues with the ceremony is it's endless back-patting and smug elitist persona, leading us nicely on to my issue with the Academy's attempts at cutting the ceremony down to a still staggeringly long 3 hours.

Instead of handing out awards during the commercial breaks, why not cut out the endless stream of pointless skits about mixing with the "lowly public" (as seen in the cringe worthy clips below from this year and last year's ceremonies) and the endless classic movie montages? Surely that would save vastly more time and help with the Academy's elitist air? In fact, these pointless filler clips pushed this year's ceremony to an eye-wateringly long 3 hours and 50 minutes, making it the longest telecast in over a decade! Thus, another example of the increasingly obnoxious Academy and their attempts to relate to the average film-going audience.

All in all, today's announcement ultimately came as little surprise. It was in fact in perfect keeping with the Academy's rapid demise over the last several years, with the ceremony barely even generating a buzz over social media anymore (only when such controversial moves are made!) Their embarrassing attempts to remain culturally relevant are painful to watch and the widening divisions over elitism and pandering are ever worsening. Yet another nail in the coffin.