by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I love movies and I love the Oscars. I really like Vanity Fair’s podcast on the lead up to the telecast that I’ve been listening to. There’s a lot — a lot — of talk about how to fix the Oscars. ABC and the Academy are so desperate that they’ve even taken to not airing some of the awards in the live broadcast.
This is extremely misguided.
I’m not particularly clever in presenting the most obvious way to fix the Oscars. Sell the rights to a major streamer and make the Goddamn thing five hours long if need be. The era of the Oscars being as huge as the Superbowl is over. There is a core group of people who watch the Oscars and everyone else.
So it’s better to indulge the people who love the Oscars’ spectacle and glitz, rather than criming the program’s style in hopes that…skate borders might watch? What the what?
Anyway, by not adopting this idea, the Academy is only hurting itself. They’re in denial. With the rise of an extremely fragmented media landscape it’s just not as easy as it used to be to get the eyeballs for the telecast that it once was.
It will be interesting to see how long it takes for the Academy to succumb to the inevitable.
