Stop Airing the Academy Awards
The ceremony is out-of-date and irrelevant to the broader public, just as its members want
Hollywood Awards shows are unique. Nearly every industry has some sort of awards ceremony, but only the entertainment industry thinks its awards shows should be actual entertainment. Nobody cares who wins — to pick a random industry that in no way symbolizes the general uselessness of awards ceremonies — the Green Leaf Award International Fertilizer Awards, for instance.
And among all the Hollywood awards ceremonies — and there are quite a few — the Academy Awards (aka the Oscars for their statue) are the most prestigious, the most important, and generally the most-watched. But in recent years this film awards ceremony is facing a uniquely TV problem: declining ratings.
The immediate reason why is easy — people don’t care. The question is why the general population cares less about what the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) considers great than in previous years. To put it perhaps too simply, there are four main trends that have emerged over the past decade that have changed the entertainment landscape:
- The rise of streaming services. Services like Netflix changed the way the industry functioned. Streamers have different ideas of how to define…
