HOLLYWOOD, 6 March 2006 — The hissing you hear is the air going out of Oscars’ balloon.
The usual aura of Academy Awards anticipation dissipated weeks ago. Wherever I went this past week, the talk was about how bad the ratings would be. With the Oscars’ TV numbers in decline since 1998, when “Titanic” helped draw a record 55 million viewers, it’s hard to imagine that this year’s show will be the one to stem the tide.
Conventional wisdom holds that the Academy has become infatuated with celebrating low-budget art films that don’t connect with mainstream America. This year’s best picture nominees, while all having turned a tidy profit, are clearly not big crowd pleasers.
But the problem with the Oscars is more deeply rooted than just public disinterest in the nominees. Ratings are crumbling for Oscars, and awards shows in general, because the Era of the Mass Event is drawing to a close. With the exception of the Super Bowl, which seems immune to anything short of a civil war, even the biggest sports and showbiz events find their ratings in decline.
Last year’s World Series had the lowest TV ratings of all time, dropping 30 percent from the 2004 Series. Last year’s NBA playoffs ratings reached near record low numbers as well, down nearly 25 percent from the 2004 season. The ratings for this year’s Grammy Awards were off 10 percent, with the show easily being beaten by an “American Idol” installment airing the same night that had 28.6 million viewers. This year’s Winter Olympics, arguably the season’s ultimate sports awards-cast, had its lowest ratings in 20 years, down 37 percent from the 2002 games in Salt Lake City.
The US is now a nation of niches. There are still blockbuster movies, hit TV shows and top-selling CDs, but fewer events that capture the communal pop culture spirit. The action is elsewhere, with the country watching cable shows or reading blogs that play to a specific audience. In the movie business, for example, many of the most profitable films in recent years weren’t costly sequels, but low-budget comedies and horror films that could be marketed inexpensively to a loyal fan base. No one is sneezing at the profits from the “Harry Potter” series, which has grossed roughly $3.5 billion worldwide. But the most envied business model in Hollywood is the one at Lionsgate Films whose two “Saw” horror movies, made for a combined cost of $6 million, have made $142 million in domestic box office alone.
Talk about the power of niches. For all their accolades, none of this year’s best picture nominees — “Brokeback Mountain,” “Capote,” “Crash,” “Good Night, and Good Luck” and “Munich” — has made as much money as “Saw II.” The biggest hit is “Brokeback Mountain,” with just over $75 million.
There is another, even more radical shift in today’s pop culture that is helping to undermine the Oscars and other tradition-bound award shows. For years, the Oscars have mattered because the awards served as a barometer of cultural heft. Just the name alone — the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences — has the air of high-minded authority to it. Millions of moviegoers who would’ve been wary of seeing a challenging film like 1969’s “Midnight Cowboy” or 1999’s “American Beauty” caved in and plunked their money down, soothed by the academy’s best picture badge of distinction.
But this elite, top-down culture is being supplanted by a raucous, participatory bottom-up culture in which amateur entertainment has more appeal than critically endorsed skill and expertise. The most obvious example of this new amateur culture is “American Idol,” which has tested its ratings clout against both the Grammy’s and the Winter Olympics, easily trouncing its competition.
In top-down culture, subtlety and sophistication rules. But like so much of today’s bottom-up culture, “American Idol” is far more about aspiration than art. It is a musical kissing cousin of MTV’s “The Real World,” allowing us to wallow in its subjects’ depressingly banal dreams and showbiz ambitions. It’s telling that “Idol” devotes much of its air time to interviews where contestants rhapsodize about their yearnings for stardom, excitedly recalling their first visit to Hollywood Boulevard or their first trip down a paparazzi-strewn red carpet.
Even though the show, for me, is little more than a tedious night at a karaoke bar, its contestants offering second-rate renditions of familiar pop fluff, it has captured the imagination of its young, largely female audience. They don’t need any gray-bearded critics to tell them what they like — they prefer creating their own stars.
Last summer, during the height of Tom Cruise’s sofa-jumping meltdown, I asked a friend’s 11-year-old daughter her opinion of Cruise. She said, forget about him. “Do you know (“American Idol” contestant) Bo Bice? He’s much cooler.”
