Saving Oscar: Even MORE Best Pictures!
First, a message for our community. Then, part three of my series: Time to introduce some new awards. Seriously
Obviously the Oscar race is not the big topic on everyone’s mind today. I grew up in the Palisades — the Highlands, no less — where all this appears to have begun. It’s been an awful experience watching the streets I knew so well, my elementary school, my junior high, the neighborhood and the small town that seemed such a world apart devastated like this in a single day.
The Palisades of today has come a long way from the remote, unpretentious, no-frills small town it was in my youth, to say the least. But it remains a special place within this bustling metropolis — a sleepy little village at Sunset’s end where time seems to stand still.
The premise of The Ankler has always been that we aren’t a business report or a web click machine, but a community outpost — leading discussion on things of interest to what is the most exciting community on Earth. Today, so many members of our community are hurting, or trapped in the terrible waiting for news of their homes.
Sunset Blvd. in the Palisades this afternoon:
When I was in elementary school, we twice had to evacuate overnight as fires approached our home. Fortunately, both times our home was saved, but I remember as a boy the terror of preparing to have your entire world torn away and how scary that is for a child. For the children of our community who have lost their homes, are seeing their schools destroyed, we can’t do enough to assure them and give them some measure of peace.
This has been a very rough business in what has lately been a very rough world, but while so many are suffering let us all try to extend some grace to those around us. There’s enough pain in our world today, let’s spread kindness wherever we can.
Any members of The Ankler community who are in distress, or feeling isolated, please feel free to reach out to us or to me personally: Richard@theankler.com. I’d love to hear from you and just hear what you’re going through. This is a big business but one very small town, and today especially it feels even smaller. Be good to each other.
But the show goes on and the Oscar race continues. So if you’re looking for something else to think about, put down the doomscrolling for a moment and enjoy part three of my Saving Oscar series. And look forward to a day soon when hopefully, the Oscar race is the biggest thing on any of our minds.
We Can’t Just Play The Hits
The topics we’ve covered this week — put on a larger-than-life show and schedule it when people care — are well within the Academy’s control. Having a roster of contenders worthy of all that attention . . . that is one problem that the Academy admittedly has the least to do with, one where there is no simple switch to flip.
When you talk about the challenges that the Academy faces in terms of drawing an audience to its annual showcase viewership-wise, you very quickly bump into the fact that the nominees are no longer films seen by hundreds of millions of people, but very often from the indie niche sector. In 2022, I looked back over almost 20 years of best picture nominees and Oscar broadcasts, showing how the nominated films in 2004 averaged $127 million at the box office ($232.7 million in 2025 dollars) and declined to $63 million by 2018 ($79 million when you account for inflation).
In hindsight, I guess we should be glad that the ratings dropped by only 39 percent in that same time period — from 43.5 million to 26.5 million (a number the Academy and ABC would die for today) — when the nominated films’ popularity declined by two-thirds! If people aren’t watching the movies, why would they care which of them get awards?
So why doesn’t the Academy just nominate blockbuster movies? Well, you turn over this rock and come to the crux of the problem: Hollywood no longer makes big, broad adult films outside of the action — or action/comedy — genres.
Even if you’re undeterred and believe Oscar should nominate the movies people are watching, let’s take a look at the list of films that grossed more than $100 million domestic last year: Inside Out 2, Deadpool & Wolverine, Wicked, Moana 2, Despicable Me 4, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Dune: Part Two, Twisters, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, Kung Fu Panda 4, Bad Boys: Ride or Die, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, Gladiator II, Sonic 3, It Ends With Us, The Wild Robot, Venom: The Last Dance, A Quiet Place: Day One, Mufasa, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, IF, Alien: Romulus.
That is it.
Of those, Wicked, Gladiator and Dune are already contenders in the mix. Wicked is even a strong possibility to win the whole thing. Many of the animated films will be up for best animated feature. Beyond that, you really have to twist yourself in knots and travel through some sort of wormhole to get to a place where you can wrap your mind around a showdown between Bad Boys 4 and Kung Fu Panda 4 for best picture.
