Superagent Robert Newman’s Big Oscar Ideas: A Live Best Picture Elimination

The WME legend has a few smart ways to make the ‘boring’ ceremony feel fresh

The Oscars head to YouTube in three years, but if Academy leaders really wants to bring the show into the modern era, they should listen to WME superagent Robert Newman.

“One of the successes of our business — sometimes to a fault, people would say — is that we are relentless about how things play for our audience,” the legendary Newman told me on Rushfield Lunch this week. If even 3 percent of the audience walks out of a test screening, Newman suggested, it’s a problem. He estimates that at a typical Oscars ceremony, maybe 10 to 15 percent of the crowd is outside at the bar; another 10 percent is playing on their phones in the balcony.

“If that were a movie, and 20 to 25 percent of the audience left a test screening, they would fire the director and the studio head in that order,” Newman said.

His outside-the-box ideas to adapt the tired ceremony? New categories like an award for the best faith-based film (to court conservative audiences, who, Newman said, are 50 percent less likely to buy tickets to movies than their progressive counterparts); requirements that voting members of the Academy watch at least 15 movies a year at the movie theater, and not just a screening room or digital portal; and publicly revealed voting totals because “people want transparency.”

Newman would also eliminate one best picture nominee at a time throughout the evening, counting down from 10 to the winner. “It creates more drama.”

Newman is a born showman, as you can tell from those suggestions. He ran marketing and distribution at Miramax for years before becoming an agent, first at ICM for 17 years and now at William Morris Endeavor. His roster of auteurs is unparalleled: Danny Boyle, Kenneth Branagh, David Cronenberg, Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro, Alex Garland, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Baz Luhrmann, Noah Hawley, Robert Rodriguez and M. Night Shyamalan.

But he’s more than just an agent — he is one of the great minds in this industry, one of the few people who really sees through the dust and the glitz. His sage wisdom is a bedrock of entertainment, and you’d be smart to watch our full conversation above.