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Citizens of showbiz, amigos of entertainment, friends in flimflammery, I stand before you tonight to report that the state of our union is . . . very messed up.
We are beset by two twin perils, working arm in arm to drive this industry if not over the cliff, then straight into the middle of a desolate swamp from which we may never emerge.
Here is the two-headed hydra that approaches from somewhere in the murk:
Hollywood has lost its grip on the world’s culture.
We are rebuilding our industry in a way destined to dismantle the creative machine that has driven entertainment for a century.
But beyond that, some things are good. The Titanic has never been a more comfortable ship to cruise.
To start, let’s take a step back to that terrible night that shook Hollywood to its core. A week and a half ago. Oscar night.
Why was this year’s show such a tragedy playing out before our eyes? All Oscar shows are terrible. All awards shows are terrible. This one was a little more embarrassing for trying to put the elephant in a tutu, but, at least they tried.
Ordinarily, you might be able to shrug away the cataclysmic ratings fall to the extraordinary times. And if it doesn’t, who cares?
But these are not ordinary times for the industry. The systemic collapse of this year’s show revealed the hollowness of the core we’re all sitting on. The greatest conglomeration of entertainers the world has ever seen—on the biggest night of the year, center stage, spotlight right on them—were unable to entertain and they didn’t seem terribly concerned with even trying to.
They couldn’t make jokes, they couldn’t touch the heartstrings, they couldn’t even speak to the concerns of anyone outside Hollywood. Since the Academy last assembled a year ago, there has been a little world-historic event that disrupted the life of the entire planet, not to mention killed millions. By my count, the show made three, extremely passing references to this happening.
That’s why this felt like an extinction-level event: the night the Hollywood elites walked away from the audience and vice versa. Even with the inner circle’s resident genius and innovator at the helm, they no longer have any understanding of who is the audience, why they are watching—and no longer particularly care.
And the whirlwind will be reaped.
A better analogy might be that this was Hollywood’s Ceausescu speech—the moment the crowds turned on the god, and what had been authoritative and inspiring in an instant became ghoulish and pathetic, and his grip on the public slipped away, fatally.
When one thinks of the mad swirl of entertainment in millions of forms from every corner of the world now available to all humanity with a thumb swipe, and compares it to that rigid, hapless, self-important, sad gathering of last weekend, it’s impossible not to feel that something has irrevocably passed from our grasp.
We might just take the lack of response to this debacle as proof in itself. Under normal circumstances, if Hollywood’s biggest show had lost three-quarters of its audience in half a decade, you would expect that a community interested in audiences would pull a few fire alarms. If there was a time when the panic button might be useful, this would be it.
Instead, we get, it will bounce back next year. Or better still, all the awards shows are down. Which is like a President of the United States saying, my approval ratings might be in the toilet, but hey, all politicians are down. As though, in the presidency, you have no power other than to just float on the winds of secular cycles.
On the upside, since I last addressed the nation of show business a year ago, diversity—in storytelling at least—has ceased to be a completely empty promise. We have, miraculously, seen the beginning of a golden age of Black dramas. If you look at the upcoming film slate of no less than the Disney company, one can no longer say that movies are just the tales of white men. Miles to go before we sleep, to be sure, but finally there is more than lip service afoot. Thanks to the streaming world, more niches, demographics, and affinity groups are being served entertainment tailored to their experiences than we could have imagined just a few years back.
But then you come to the flip side where you ask, where is this all leading, for the industry, for our influence as storytellers? The optimistic elite case is that while film may have become, in their eyes, a loss-leader legacy business, we can all adapt and accept that streaming services are the center of the world. Premium subscriptions today! Premium subscriptions forever!
Easy enough transition as wrenching transitions go. And yet . . . .
This has been a sneak peek preview of this special State of the Union edition of The Ankler, the industry’s secret newsletter. To read the rest of this historic annual review, subscribe today for just $10 a month and don’t miss out on who’s in the hot seat next!
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