Each year fewer people are going to the movies.
Yet, it seems like interest in the Academy Awards is at an all time high.
In the weeks leading up to this years Academy Awards, the media as a whole – not just entertainment journalists – was making it sound like there was a horse race going on between The King’s Speech and The Social Network comparable to a presidential election. During the night of the telecast everyone with a Facebook and/or Twitter account was giving a play-by-play of the event. And in the week following, there was endless scrutiny about the job James Franco and Anne Hathaway did as hosts.
No one cares that Americans haven’t actually seen the films that are nominated – the average American only attended six movies in 2010, so it seems likely that most Oscar viewers only saw a handful of the nominated movies. But it doesn’t matter because so many auxiliary industries make a fortune by drumming up the Oscars into a faux cultural event.
The Academy Awards is a non-news event that the media cooks up into one of the biggest news stories of the year. And I say “non-news” not because I detest the Academy Awards, but because so few people have seen the nominated movies (let alone any movie), and viewership of the telecast is no where near as large as something like the Super Bowl (37 million viewers vs. nearly 100 million). And it is the media that is more concerned than Hollywood about inflating interest in the Academy of Awards.
Oscar chatter only helps boost ticket sales for a few films; all media outlets collectively benefit from Oscar buzz. By turning it into a life and death horse race between movies and actors, the news industry is able to sell more newspapers and magazines, as well as increase online readership by promising to provide the inside track on who will win and what deserves to win.
While writers for highbrow publications like The New Yorker and New York Times scoff at the attention the Oscars are given, they are all complicit in Oscar Industrial Complex because they want a piece of the collateral Oscar revenue.
None of this really groundbreaking, but what surprises me is how easily people get caught up in the hype.
First, it’s not a horse race. It’s not like a movie’s chances of winning an award rises and falls from day to day – it’s not an election or the playoffs. Further, unless someone polls the Academy voters, no one actually has an inside track – in fact, you don’t have to be a Hollywood insider to accurately guess the kinds of movies the Academy tends to honor.
Next, viewers have no real stake in the films that win. I suppose it is exciting when a film you like wins an award, but no one brags about Oscar winners like they do when their home team wins the World Series or Super Bowl. I mean, I don’t see anyone walking around with T-shirts that says: “Return of the King: Best Picture 2004,” or see a studio throwing a parade for the best picture winner that is attended by millions of fans.
But what really gets me, are people who tune into the Academy Awards telecast thinking that it could be great entertainment. For some delusional reason, people believe that it could contain comedy that will rival anything else on TV that night, or that something totally mind-blowing could happen that will be talked about at the water cooler for months. The post show critique is always the same: the show was long and the host(s) wasn’t as funny as Billy Crystal.
Despite the disappointment year after year, we keep feeding the machine. Hollywood gets to feel self-important and the media laughs all the way to the bank as we eat up its dribble.
