Saving Oscar: Go Big or You Will Go Home
In my special weeklong series, I offer four big fixes to the major problems holding the Academy back. Today: A call to arms
I’m writing a special series this week about how to fix the Oscars — and by extension, Hollywood. If you have any thoughts on the topic, drop me a line at richard@theankler.com.
Last night’s Globes was the perfect event for the modern awards slog: pleasant, forgettable, self-serving, probably corrupt and meaningless. The night wasn’t the meltdown of last year’s Jo Koy-helmed show; they managed to pull off something resembling a normal, cookie-cutter awards night with a likable host, so we’ll call it a great success.
Critics seem happy with their award choices, so we can overlook that we have no clue anymore who “they” are. (Yes, I know the names of the Globes’ voting members are listed on the site, but really.) Or what this group represents beyond being foreigners handing out trophies in service of the conglomerate which on one hand, owns all the media that covers the Globes, and on the other, has a financial stake in one of the major producers of awards-bait films (A24).
Four days ago, I wrote that it would be very interesting if Todd Boehly’s Golden Globes gave one of its biggest prizes to the contender that Boehly very much wants to see succeed thanks to his early backing. “If the story of the Globes was an upset victory for The Brutalist,” I wrote, “that would be quite a shot in the arm as we go into the final stretch. Especially cozy when Daddy’s awards show can give a prize to one of his own kids.”
Four days later, I find this development no less compelling.
Particularly as we know . . . nothing about the voters, their priorities, what influences they’re subject to — or anything else. Say what you will about the HFPA in the olden days, you knew who they were, you saw them everywhere, and if you wondered what they were thinking, you could walk up and ask them.
Last night, the winners were left to thank “the Golden Globes” themselves, as though they sprung magically from Zeus’ head onto the awards calendar. Meanwhile, even the non-Penske media — with the lone exception of the New York Post — can barely be bothered to look at it.
However, can you imagine any work more heroic or fulfilling than that of the poor Variety and Hollywood Reporter staffers Sunday night sending out “breaking news” every two minutes? I have carpal tunnel after expending the labor of deleting messages from both from my inbox this morning. But I commend these brave Hollywood Pravda-style outlets who can write headlines as purely objective as “The Golden Globes Reclaims its Chaotic Glory.”
That should prove to everyone how low the expectations are in this sector at this moment, how base-level questions like “What the hell is this thing?” aren’t worth anyone’s time to ask. If you can insert some Frankenstein’s monster of an awards show concoction into the open spot on the calendar and the host isn’t a complete wipeout, we’ll call it a victory.
Welcome to the state of Awardsdom 2025, with just two months to go!
Not Giving Up on the Oscars
With the Globes behind us, we get onto the main event. After all the buildup, positioning, dinners, screenings and Q&As, we get the nominees in 11 days and then the final six-week push to the Dolby Stage where on March 2, we’ll learn what the Academy thought was the best film of 2024.
I’d only be slightly exaggerating to say no one is anticipating this final phase with glee. There are the people who worked on the films. The nominees have families who are surely likely to watch. There are the people who work in the awards industrial complex — enough of them to be worth a ratings point by themselves! There are thousands of awards nerds scattered in forums across the internet. The six-month Oscar dirge certainly tests the loyalty of even its greatest defenders, and it’s possible that there’s no place where awards fatigue cuts deeper than in the industry that whole thing is meant to serve.
Beyond that, you’d be hard-pressed to spot any sign of interest or anticipation among the general public.
To be sure, out of habit or boredom, a certain number of millions will watch the show. Last year’s show managed to be the 74th most-watched broadcast of the year, behind only 60 football games, the Thanksgiving parade and political programming. Many more will see the red carpet pictures the next day. That number might be up or down a bit from last year and the year before, but no one questions which way the arrow is pointing for Oscars — and all the awards shows. As one great savant in this field put it to me, “The Oscars started out as a dinner for the community, and then other people got interested, and now we’ll be back to being a dinner for the community.”
So what does this road look like? Well, you’ll have up years and down years. Every fourth year, a miracle will give you a Barbenheimer. But the overall direction is unmistakable. It’s the path of newspapers, LaserDiscs, Kiwanis Club dinners and all sorts of other things that never crossed over into this digital age. Most of them still hold on in some form or other, but they’ve ceased to be any sort of cultural force and now live alongside stamp collectors, trainspotters and professional calligraphers in some cozy niche netherworlds.
Business schools will study how Hollywood — an industry whose entire job is communicating with the public — squandered more goodwill and devotion than any industry ever had.
So how did we get here? More to the point, is there any digging our way out of this ditch?
When we talk about saving Oscar, you get very quickly into the fact that these awards mean something very different to different people and factions. Like all great religions, Oscar was created with enough ambiguity that everyone’s interpretation could be correct.
Into the voice of Oscar, we project everything we each want for the entertainment world. I say that it should be a promotional event for Hollywood. But even at the beginning that’s not exactly what it was, and as early as the first dinner to plan the new group, people left with very different notions of what this was for. For the moguls, it was primarily a sort of trade association, built to fend off salary demands — with the awards as an afterthought. For others, it was a chance to burnish Hollywood’s moral standing. Almost immediately, it became the focus of boycotts and grandstanding.
All this back and forth happened, however, at a moment when film’s primacy in the culture was unquestioned and unshakable — when something like half the country went to the movies every week. Now, with film’s place in our culture much more of an open question, these battles over the soul of Oscar can look more like a sector in a death spiral, picking over the corpse, rather than the vibrant debate of a community in its prime.
At this point, it may be tempting to write off Oscar’s fate as an outdated irrelevancy, sailing off to its overdue obsolescence alongside vaudeville, radio dramas, disaster films and TV variety hours in the big hall of discarded genres in the sky, but we can’t give up on it yet.