94th Academy Awards Discussion Thread | WHAT JUST HAPPENED

[dudalb]

11 minutes ago, grey ghost said:

Oscar bait ain't what it used to be.

 

Gone are the days when most people you knew went to see Goodfellas, Forest Gump, Saving Private Ryan and Titanic.

 

Did the culture change or did the movies?

 

I would say both but especially the latter. Today's oscar bait is far less accessible and compelling to the general audience. 

 

 

It's a case that the studiios decided to go all in on appealing to the younger audience with big, expensive  CGI driven blockbusters and there is no money for tthe mid range budget dramatic films like the ones you mention ( with the exception of Titanic which a very expensive film, but feels like a mid range dramatic film). I wonder if James Cameron tried to get Titanic made today it  would be turned down because a period film would not appeal to the young audience.

[The Wild Eric]

21 minutes ago, grey ghost said:

Oscar bait ain't what it used to be.

 

Gone are the days when most people you knew went to see Goodfellas, Forest Gump, Saving Private Ryan and Titanic.

 

Did the culture change or did the movies?

 

I would say both but especially the latter. Today's oscar bait is far less accessible and compelling to the general audience. 

 

 

Honey it ain't less accessible, at least in quality and content. It's just that their marketing and distribution is way worse. Plus audiences today are so undemanding and only want cheap thrills out of their entertainment that the very idea of a movie that isn't designed to sell toys or milk sequels out of is too much for their tiny brains to handle.

 

Baby food culture is a disease, and sadly nobody wants to grow up and act like adults

[grim22]

 

 

[The Wild Eric]

 

[Menor the Destroyer]

7 minutes ago, Eric Says Trans Rights said:

Honey it ain't less accessible, at least in quality and content. It's just that their marketing and distribution is way worse. Plus audiences today are so undemanding and only want cheap thrills out of their entertainment that the very idea of a movie that isn't designed to sell toys or milk sequels out of is too much for their tiny brains to handle.

 

Baby food culture is a disease, and sadly nobody wants to grow up and act like adults

What movies you choose to watch has nothing to do with how adult you are (or the size of your brain). I would say acting like adults should also include not resorting to insults just because people don't share your preferences.

[CoolioD1]

7 minutes ago, grim22 said:

 

 

I'm trying to figure out the exact moment the Oscars started to become embarrassed by themselves in a way that just made them more embarrassing. it's been trending that way for the last 5 or 6 years. i guess it was around the time of the whole #oscarssowhite thing.

[DAJK]

19 minutes ago, Eric Says Trans Rights said:

Honey it ain't less accessible, at least in quality and content. It's just that their marketing and distribution is way worse. Plus audiences today are so undemanding and only want cheap thrills out of their entertainment that the very idea of a movie that isn't designed to sell toys or milk sequels out of is too much for their tiny brains to handle.

 

Baby food culture is a disease, and sadly nobody wants to grow up and act like adults

Uhhhh.... everything ok?

[filmlover]

I guess if there's one good thing that came out of this ceremony, it's that public awareness of alopecia just skyrocketed through the roof.

[The Wild Eric]

11 minutes ago, Menor Reborn said:

What movies you choose to watch has nothing to do with how adult you are (or the size of your brain). I would say acting like adults should also include not resorting to insults just because people don't share your preferences.

I mean I'm a pretty balanced person (so hyped for Sonic 2!), but a lot of my preferences are losing ground and are being pushed further towards irrelevancy. I think I'm allowed to vent on what's the big problem. Plus, I didn't go after anybody specifically for their tastes, just a general public thing. If you know you don't just like cheap thrills, then you're not part of the problem. You cool.

 

1 minute ago, DAJK said:

Uhhhh.... everything ok?

Oh I'm more than fine. Work was pretty hectic, but I got through it. I just don't like this whole insinuation about how "Oscar movies are so niche! They don't award the movies people really care about like they used to", as if what they nominate is somehow bad or these cultish, inaccessible pieces. There's nothing inaccessible or hard to get into with King Richard or Belfast or CODA or West Side Story. Some are a bit more artistically-minded or out there, but a movie like Licorice Pizza isn't this niche, hard to understand film.

 

And I think it's pretty wack that these movies, which would have made the top 10 back in the 70s or 80s or 90s are being disrespected and that they're inaccessible or hard to get a grasp on. I might be harsh in what I say, but sometimes that's the only solution. Sorry.

[Cap]

1 minute ago, Eric Says Trans Rights said:

I might be harsh in what I say, but sometimes that's the only solution. Sorry.

My mom always says it’s not what you say it’s how you say it. 🙂

[filmlover]

Actual awards-related news has been lost in the aftermath, but this year with the return of a solid 10 movies we had at three Best Picture nominees (Don't Look Up, Licorice Pizza, Nightmare Alley) go home empty-handed. Also not to kick more sand in their faces, but I can't imagine Netflix is happy that they did all that campaigning with their director-driven projects only to go home with less wins than a Tammy Faye biopic.

[Napoleon]

I support the changes the Academy is making. People need to be realistic about this. The ratings have been declining, the Oscars are becoming irrelevant. Without changes, it will soon have the winners announced via press release, because they won't have the money to fund a ceremony no one watches anymore. Movie fans have been mad about changes in the show that don't actually make the Oscars lose its purpose of honoring the best of the year in filmmaking.

[Mr Terrific]

Will Smith acted like an asshole last night and certainly earned a lot of criticism. 
I do take his apology at face value though. I parse celeb apologies pretty hard. This one left out the sly if-you-were-offended shit. His acknowledgement of what set him off managed to explain without trying to excuse. 

[Jason]

30 minutes ago, Napoleon said:

I support the changes the Academy is making. People need to be realistic about this. The ratings have been declining, the Oscars are becoming irrelevant. Without changes, it will soon have the winners announced via press release, because they won't have the money to fund a ceremony no one watches anymore. Movie fans have been mad about changes in the show that don't actually make the Oscars lose its purpose of honoring the best of the year in filmmaking.

I don't think the changes in question are likely to compel general audiences to watch the awards. If anything, replacing actual awards with other content is likely to hurt, because the point of watching an awards show, is you know, to see awards. If you wanted comedy etc. you'd just go watch that instead.

Truth be told, most of the forces driving down viewership are outside the Academy's control. ABC should have a simulcast (with ads of course) be made available, because there's a whole generation of people out there now that don't have cable and sure as hell aren't going to get it for ABC's sake.

As for the funding of the ceremony, it's a pretty small portion of the Academy's expenses. For example, in 2020 they spent $24 million total on all expenses specifically related to the Academy Awards; the revenue from their contract with ABC was a total of $128 million. They could easily continue to fund the Awards ceremony itself even with a dramatic reduction in revenue from the Awards; the largest chunk of the Academy's expenses ($50 million a year) is actually used to fund the Academy Grants program.

They've also been running a surplus of around $30 to $40 million dollars a year for the past several years, that they've been using to build an investment portfolio, now worth over $500 million.

AMPAS is not going to be in a position where they can't continue to support the Awards themselves. The risk would be having to make cuts to other expenses that I'm sure are very important to them, such as the Grants program.

(Edit: all figures are from the publicly available tax filings of AMPAS; as a non-profit it is required that they be made publicly available.)

Edited March 29, 2022 by Jason

[Menor the Destroyer]

39 minutes ago, Eric Says Trans Rights said:

I mean I'm a pretty balanced person (so hyped for Sonic 2!), but a lot of my preferences are losing ground and are being pushed further towards irrelevancy. I think I'm allowed to vent on what's the big problem. Plus, I didn't go after anybody specifically for their tastes, just a general public thing. If you know you don't just like cheap thrills, then you're not part of the problem. You cool.

I just think you made a lot of insinuations that don't really make sense. Let's even accept the premise that audiences only want cheap thrills out of movies (I don't think this is true). Even in this case, someone who goes to movies for cheap thrills isn't necessarily a dumb or shallow person. 

Edited March 29, 2022 by Menor Reborn

[filmlover]

At this point I think the only thing that can really save the Oscars show is moving to streaming. The reason for punting some of the categories to before the telecast was to save up on time, and they still ended up with a show that went nearly 40 minutes overtime. Part of that can probably be attributed to everybody wanting the rest of the evening to go down stress-free after the awkwardness of The Slap, but it's becoming increasingly obvious each year where the real problems are that for some reason ABC/AMPAS aren't willing (or perhaps too ego-driven) to fix.

[filmlover]

One of the heads of ABC pretty much throws Will Packer and his co-producer under a bus for most of the highly-criticized actually-scripted stuff from the telecast.

 

 

 

Oscars: What Was Happening in the ABC Control Room as Will Smith Slapped Chris Rock (EXCLUSIVE) https://t.co/rwYtaG7ESk

— Variety (@Variety) March 28, 2022

[Porthos]

48 minutes ago, filmlover said:

But it's becoming increasingly obvious each year where the real problems are that for some reason ABC/AMPAS aren't willing (or perhaps too ego-driven) to fix.

 

Quote

What caused the telecast to go beyond three hours?

Every year I try and find out what I can put my finger on, “Here’s what made it so long.” And every year it’s the same, I honestly don’t know. All of a sudden, I look at the clock and it’s past 11 o’clock on the East Coast,” Mills said. “The show in rehearsals felt like it went quickly. Obviously, speeches go along, but the speeches were beautiful last night. I don’t think there’s anyone you really didn’t want to hear from or say that that speech should have been shorter. You’re trying to pack an entire year’s worth of celebration of movies and in three hours, and it’s always difficult. Certainly Will Packer really came in with the idea that this has got to be not a second over three hours. Everybody has that intention. Sometimes you look at a show and you’ll say, ‘if I do it all over again, maybe we would have moved that or cut that here.’ I’m hard pressed to find anything that I thought was really really too long, and we should have gotten rid of.”

 

in real life:

 

==

 

More seriously,  if you don't want to cut down the speeches, and if you don't want to cut down on the "celebration", and in fact you think that's why it should be there, then it stands to reason you can't shorten it.

 

I have no idea if speeches have gotten longer as time has gone on.  Given how self-absorbed we are as a culture, it wouldn't surprise me, but I'd still want some hard data to back up the conclusion.

 

So if we're not seriously willing to cut back on folks' acceptance speeches, then the only place to trim the fat is the celebration angle.  But, again, if you're not willing to cut individual numbers or shorten them...

 

Well, tell me again how to squeeze the blood out of the stone.

Edited March 29, 2022 by Porthos

[Porthos]

I mean, with that attitude... just own the length.

 

"We're The Oscars.  It's gonna be bloated and fully of lengthy speeches and kitchy set pieces, and if you don't like it, don't watch."  Just come out and say "we don't care if Modern Culture has a short attention span, we are unwilling to do a damn thing to shorten this.  This is who we are."

 

I'd respect them a hell of a lot more if they just did that.

 

And, yes, at least some of this is from a grumpy baseball fan that is irked at the obsession of shortening games because The Powers That Be think all folks care about is getting things over ASAP.  Yes, no one likes a slog.  At the same time human beings can be pretty terrible when it comes to trying to figure out how to speed things up without sacrificing the je nais se quois that makes something special in the first place.

 

So, instead of trying stupid stunts that don't even up even helping, just own the god damn length.  The organizers will feel better in the morning and I suspect folks would at least appreciate the honesty if still gripe about the length.

[Potiki]

37 minutes ago, filmlover said:

At this point I think the only thing that can really save the Oscars show is moving to streaming.

Lets say the average viewership per household was 2 and a half hours, the roughly 15 million or so viewers would make it the biggest show on streaming for the week just from the live broadcast, I'm not sure many streaming services has the infrastructure to handle that kind of demand Netflix doesn't do live, Disney has tested it but not to that scale etc. That is without this supposed bump that streaming would bring.

 

Also moving entirely to streaming alienates the older demographic, if they want to draw a younger audience they should have it be something like The Game Awards that is shown globally on Twitch, YouTube etc. with trailer for upcoming games (in the Oscars instance it would movies) that said it would be weird to have anticipated MCU/DC/Star Wars etc. titles having trailers than seguing to an Indie film winning best picture so that is not likely to happen.

 

So yeah streaming isn't a great miracle here, the reality is that for most awards shows is younger people will catch up with social media clips on YouTube, Tik Tok, Twitter etc. and watch the best moments rather than watch the live show.  The demographic that will still watch it live are hardcore cinephiles and older people both of whom are probably fine with watching it on ABC which is a free broadcast channel, Disney could simulcast it on Hulu and get a few people who don't have cable and have poor antenna coverage in their area but that would likely only lead to a minimal bump.