By WARREN DAY
It’s been called “the Super Bowl for the LGBT community,” celebrated along with Gay Pride and Halloween as a major touchstone of the gay calendar. The Academy Awards usually pulls in the biggest TV audience of the year for any non-related Super Bowl program, and yet there are signs that the Oscars may be going the way of the Miss America Pageant: sliding towards increasing irrelevance for both gays and straights.
On Sunday, the 84th Academy Awards will be held in Hollywood, California at a venue that has been known for the last ten years as the “Kodak Theatre,” but which is now nameless since the Kodak Company has filed for bankruptcy after experiencing its own decline towards insignificance.
Another uniquely American icon–the Miss America Pageant–was, from the late 1940s through the late 1960s, one of the nation’s most popular annual events, ranking particularly high among gays: after all, it was a kind of drag show–a high camp event before straights even knew what that meant. But with the changing role of women in society and the growth of feminism, Miss America increasingly seemed out of touch. In 2004, with its television audience just a third of what it once had been, the pageant went into the cable wilderness for nearly a decade before returning to network TV in 2011, with little notice or ratings.
There are those in Hollywood–as well as those who live off of what Hollywood produces–who worry that the Academy Awards could be on the downward slide to obsolescence. Sadly, there are signs this could be happening:
Sign 1: A Disparity Between the Movies the Public Actually Sees and the Ones the Academy Rewards Among the nine films nominated for Best Picture, only one ranks in the top-40 most popular films of the year, and it’s at number 13 (“The Help”). The next one, “Moneyball,” is at 41. The likely winner, “The Artist,” is at number 105, and earned just 7% of the box office receipts as “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows: Part II.” There’s a direct correlation to the size of the TV audience and whether any popular films are in the running, such as “Titanic” in 1997, or “The Return of the King” in 2003. It’s great that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences seeks to reward filmmaking excellence rather than popularity, but when there’s this much of a gap between films that interest the public and the ones featured on the Oscars show, there’s a serious disconnect for the audience.
Sign 2: Academy Voters Are Very different from the Average Moviegoer Whites make up 66% of movie-going audiences, but they account for a whopping 94% of the Academy’s 5,765 members. Women comprise 52% of moviegoers, but only 23% of Academy voters. Perhaps most revealing of all, 67% of moviegoers are under the age of 40, but only 2% of the Academy falls within this age group. Is it any wonder that moviegoers don’t always agree with the Academy’s choices?
Sign 3: The Glut of Film A wards Shows When the Academy first started handing out Oscars in 1929, the show had the field pretty much to itself. But now there’s an avalanche of awards and awards shows, beginning in May with the Cannes Film Festival, and eventually becoming almost a daily affair from early December until the end of February. Someone might be forgiven for thinking the Oscars had already been awarded by the time the actual telecast comes along.
Sign 4: An Inability to Keep the Telecast to a Reasonable Length In a country with an A.D.D. affliction, any show that lasts over three and a half hours (well past midnight for the Eastern Time zone) that doesn’t involve easy-on-the-eyes Olympic athletes is going to be in trouble. There’s wide agreement that one answer is to reduce the number of awards presented on the telecast, but so far no workable consensus on what those awards should be.
Sign 5: How Bad the Recent Oscar Shows Have Been Many people believe that it’s been at least eight years since the show had a great host (Billy Crystal, in 2004), with James Franco last year being considered one of the worst (he was upstaged by the 94-yearold Kirk Douglas, for crying out loud). The public is barely aware of the difficulty of putting together the Oscars show: one that balances the demands for an industry-insider evening with mass appeal for those outside that industry (while at the same time accommodating some of the biggest egos this side of Mount Olympus).
Sign 6: Some Years, the Winners Are Predictable in Advance With the barrage of pre-awards events and the constant babbling of Oscar-predictors, oftentimes you don’t have to watch the show to know who will win, and with that lack of suspense comes a lack of interest (and audience). This year, it’s widely predicted that “The Artist” will win Best Picture, Best Actor (Jean Dujardin), and Best Director, with “The Help” winning Best Actress (Viola Davis) and Best Supporting Actress (Octavia Spencer). Christopher Plummer is expected to take home the statue as Best Supporting Actor for playing a gay man who comes out of the closet at age 72 (“Beginners”).
Why Watch? With all that said, there are some excellent reasons to watch this year. Arguably the best Oscar host ever–Billy Crystal–returns. There are new producers who promise some real surprises. And no matter what the consensus on who will be the winners this year, there are always one or two upsets. A performance by Cirque du Soleil will do homage to the movies, with the largest cast they’ve ever assembled. One or two actors are sure to say something totally outrageous, and an equal number will say something that’s genuinely moving. Someone will wear a dress that will cause eyes to roll, and the “In Memoriam” segment on Elizabeth Taylor will cause many eyes to well up in tears. So let others bitch and moan, this once-a-year telecast is still the place where guilty pleasures come in abundance, where people who have everything can be observed losing something they desperately want, where people who are typically well-scripted become tongue-tied on their own, and where you can witness the rich and famous engaging in the sort of faux pas you would never do yourself. Most importantly, some good but neglected movies will receive some much-needed national attention.
Sounds like a worthwhile Sunday evening to me.
Warren Day
