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Are the Oscars culturally relevant? |
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Written by Mark Caro, MCT
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Friday, 23 February 2007 |
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This year's Academy Awards promotional campaign is tied to famous movie quotes, so there's a bus kiosk poster on Santa Monica Boulevard that reads: "`Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn.' The Oscars."
No irony is intended.
Yet getting people to, in fact, give a damn has been the Academy's mission and struggle during the past several years, as competing awards shows have been stealing the Oscars' thunder while the Academy Awards red carpet has become just one — albeit an especially fabulous one — in an ever-growing line of celebrity fashion shows. The Academy attempted to re-establish the show's dominance in 2004 by moving it from March to February, but the issues haven't done a fade-out.
Yes, Oscar hoopla lives on, but now images of nominees such as Helen Mirren and Jennifer Hudson are competing with wall-to-wall TV and Web coverage of bald, breaking-down Britney Spears and the increasingly tawdry soap opera surrounding dead bombshell Anna Nicole Smith.
"Right now they're a blip in the shadow of Anna Nicole and Britney and astronauts trying to kidnap other astronauts in diapers," said E! Online entertainment columnist Bruce Bibby, who writes under the name Ted Casablanca. "You can barely tell they're going on."
To true film fans, the worlds of the Oscars and tabloids should remain separate. The Oscars are about cinematic appreciation, not celebrity gossip, and if people become more aware of that distinction, good.
Yet to the greater public, the Academy Awards are a towering, glitzy cultural event, with the dresses, jewels, snubs and Cinderella stories at least as important as the notion of Hollywood celebrating its own artistry. So in an age when a model's death attracts far more interest than ex-President Gerald Ford's, it's fair to ask:
How culturally relevant are the Oscars?
"It's the prom night for the film industry," Mirren, the best actress front-runner for "The Queen," said at Thursday night's Miramax party. "It's become a global phenomenon ... It's the culmination of (the Academy's) efforts to draw attention to film and film as an industry and as a profession.
"But what it means culturally, society is spinning out of control, and now there are so many side issues related to it: the parties, the marketing, the gifts — all kinds of things. I couldn't define that in one go."
Peter O'Toole, who's on his eighth best actor nomination (with no wins so far) for "Venus," said at the Miramax party that since his first nomination for 1962's "Lawrence of Arabia," he is sure of one thing about Oscar hoopla: "It has increased. It was always very big. Always. In terms of popularity, in terms of the world, it's a symbol. The world knows the Oscar as well as they know the Union Jack or the Stars & Stripes. It's one of the images of our times."
Match that iconic status with a booming multimedia industry of Oscar prognosticators, gossips and fan advocates, and this year's show should be big — especially when you consider that this is the most competitive race in recent memory for the biggest award, best picture. All five nominated films — Martin Scorsese's crime film "The Departed," Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris' dysfunctional family comedy "Little Miss Sunshine," Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's global drama "Babel," Clint Eastwood's Japanese-language World War II story "Letters from Iwo Jima" and Stephen Frears' comedy of manners "The Queen" — are all thought to have a shot at winning (with the first three considered the strongest candidates).
Yet anecdotal evidence and a general reading of the Oscar temperature give no indication the show will break the downward viewership trend of the past couple of years. ABC isn't necessarily worried; the network sold out all of its ads two weeks ago at an average of $1.7 million per 30-second spot, up from $1.65 million last year and $1.5 million in 2005. Consistently the year's most popular entertainment program (although January's "American Idol" premiere drew 37.3 million viewers, close to last year's Oscar numbers), the Academy Awards attract the kind of educated, affluent audience that advertisers love.
Whether this audience is actually excited about the show's content may be another story.
"I don't know what the movies are," Carol Holian, a tourist from San Diego, admitted as she took in the sights near the Kodak Theatre while workers scurried back and forth wearing their laminated Oscar credentials. "I know what some of them are, but it's more the stars and the people watching."
"I watch the stuff on E! about the clothes," added her 15-year-old niece, Katie Holian.
Inside the Kodak's mall complex, Patrick Van Beusekom, a 38-year-old documentary filmmaker from San Francisco, said this year he won't be predicting winners at an Oscar party because "I know the movies that are up for Oscars, but I haven't seen any of them. Well, I saw `The Queen' on an airplane."
"I feel like the older I get, the less I'm interested in it," agreed Van Beusekom's filmmaking partner, Jonny Burhop, 26, although he still views the Oscars as "the one legitimate awards show of the year."
A recently conducted Harris Poll found that 43 percent of U.S. adults plan to watch the show while 54 percent expect to skip it (though no comparison was given to last year). Most women (52 percent) expect to watch; most men (64 percent) plan not to. Age groups 18-30 and 31-42 actually are more likely to watch (48 percent each) than ages 43-61 (43 percent) and 62 and older (32 percent).
The popularity of a particular Oscar show is generally thought to be tied to the profiles of the nominated movies and performers. Last year's telecast, in which "Crash" beat out "Brokeback Mountain" in a field of mostly independent-type films, attracted 38.9 million viewers, down from the 42.1 million of the 2005 telecast ("Million Dollar Baby") and the 43.5 million of the 2004 one ("Lord of the Rings: Return of the King"), according to Nielsen Media Research.
That 2004 telecast (for films released in 2003) was the first to air in February instead of March, and its viewership represented a significant jump over the 33 million who saw "Chicago" win in 2003 in the lowest-rated show ever. (Some viewership numbers were lower in the 1960s, but the ratings as measured in households watching were much higher.) But the telecast has yet to approach the 55.2 million viewers of the "Titanic" victory telecast in 1998 and the following two years in which wins by "Shakespeare in Love" and "American Beauty" drew 45.6 and 46.3 million viewers, respectively.
The Academy moved up the air date to tighten the drawn-out Oscar campaigns and to boost the show's stature in a crowded landscape that had the Golden Globes, the Screen Actors Guild and other groups giving out many similar awards over the previous weeks. The Globes, which also honor television in a looser, more alcohol-fueled environment, actually scored its best ratings in 2004, the year of the Oscars' shift to February (26.8 million viewers), followed by two relatively weak years (16.8 million and 18.8 million in 2005 and 2006) and a bit of a rebound for this January's telecast (20 million).
Academy spokeswoman Leslie Unger said the Oscars' move to February has been successful "in some ways. ... I think there is a sense that it is more timely. I think the sense is by being in February instead of March, there's a stronger recognition and remembrance of the films (from the previous year)." To Unger, this year's overall interest level feels the same as usual.
But some see a downside to the earlier date and compressed Oscar campaigns — for moviegoers as well as the studios. Beforehand, a film such as "Shakespeare in Love" could open in December and enjoy a three-month ride of Oscar publicity in the theaters, boosting its box office and enabling more viewers to have a stake in it come Oscar night.
"There are just fewer weeks to have a box-office bump," said New York publicist Cynthia Swartz, who helped coordinate the Oscar campaign for "The Queen." "I wonder whether having films in the marketplace for another month would help people become more familiar with the nominees. I worry that there are a lot of people out there who haven't seen or even heard of a number of them."
Film critic/historian Leonard Maltin said although more good movies have been opening before December since the shift, end-of-the-year Oscar-hopeful releases have been brutalized; "Letters from Iwo Jima" is the only December release among the current best picture nominees. "What is continuing to happen is what's always happened," he said, citing films such as "Children of Men," "The Painted Veil" and "Miss Potter" that got lost.
In Maltin's view, the Golden Globes have surpassed the Oscars "in terms of celebrity gawking. ... But no one can touch the Oscars in terms of tradition, continuity and legitimacy.
"Now whether anyone values tradition, continuity and tradition, I don't know." | Only registered users can write comments.
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