Wow, sure has been awhile.
I’ve written a few blog posts since my last one, but not posted anything. I might post them just to archive them for myself, personally. I didn’t post anything mostly because 1) I got sick- very, very sick; and 2) I was curious to see how things would unfold nationally if I just stepped away for awhile.
I learned a lot by not doing. Someday, I might talk more about the knowledge I gained from merely watching things, but not today. I can feel my writing skills getting rustier by the minute, so I need to attend to that little problem and fix of it what I can.
Well… so. This post.
I saw the Oscars on Sunday, and thought that I might discuss my thoughts and feeling about it, since I’ve had a few days to digest what I saw. So, here goes….
The Oscars were…. interesting. Not funny. Not inspiring. Certainly not enjoyable. But it was interesting, more for what was not said than what was expressed out loud (in some cases, very, very loud) by the attendees.
My overall impression is this: Hollywood is scared. Scared, of the present, but mostly of the future, and also more than a little angry at the world.
Watching the Oscars this year was far from pleasant. It left me with a sick feeling in my stomach. You know how when you’re in the same room with someone extremely fearful and anxious, that you can’t help but feel anxious yourself? That’s how I felt after the show had concluded. I felt profoundly uneasy. It was disconcerting as hell, and jarring considering how I used to feel in years past after watching the show.
I remember watching the Oscars as a teen in the 90’s and feeling awed and inspired. Hell, alone amongst my friends, I used to look forward to them. To me, the Oscars meant class, confidence and style. Man…. wow. The way things used to be, haha. This year, the feeling I got from the attendees was that of desperation. I pitied them somewhat; a weird reaction, but I guess a reasonable one, considering the state of things.
The Oscars just aren’t relevant anymore. They don’t seem to count for anything. Off the top of my head, I can’t even remember the names of most of the best picture winners, let alone the nominees of this decade. Hell, it literally took me like 5 minutes of hard thinking and head scratching to remember that “Moonlight” won best picture last year, and that was only because I remembered the envelope snafu. I have no idea who took home best picture 2 years ago. Literally no clue.
Though I do remember that Fargo, As Good as it Gets, Schindler’s List, and Titanic won back in the 90’s.
In a way, the Oscars’ plight is a mirror of the problems facing Hollywood in general. People don’t really go to the movies much anymore, at least, not like they used to. Certainly the younger generation doesn’t. In the war for their entertainment dollars, the xBox has utterly crushed Hollywood, especially in that still crucially important demographic of young white males.
And it doesn’t look as though that’s changing anytime soon, except in the way that Hollywood doesn’t want it to go. Hence, I suppose, Hollywood’s fear. Video games are annihilating film as the entertainment choice for young people. And so is social media of course. And Netflix obviously. In fact things have become so bad that even for me it feels weirdly antiquated to actually go to a theater to watch a movie, and I mean ANY movie. Even stuff like Star Wars.
For the Oscars, as THE symbol of the status of the moviegoing experience, the writing is on the wall, and they know it. Their status as a cultural force peaked decades ago, and has been in a gradual slide downward since. Today, they are teetering on irrelevancy. And not even because of the record low ratings. It’s just… nobody cares. It’s all so boring, so old, and staid.
In a way, the show’s bloated 4 hour running time is a kind of effrontery of that fact. It’s like a rejection of the accusation that the show doesn’t matter anymore. Which, I’ll bet, is why they refuse to pare it down. Because to whittle it down to 2 hours would be to publicly admit their reduced status.
So… the diversity push. To me it came across like the Oscars think it’s their last chance. In a way, the 4 hour diversity push that was Sunday’s show reminds me of the constant diversity pushes of the legacy media, like CNN and the newspapers. The feeling seems to be: “White people have lost interest in us, so we’re going to represent the interests of the minorities, whether they like it or not.” To me, the sheer aggressiveness and relentlessness of the politics on display was too much to be anything other than an expression of profound insecurity. They literally doth protest too much, as if by trying to be as loud as possible, they can get someone, anyone, to take them seriously and pay attention to them again.
So, yeah, it was fear that I saw. And it was unsettling, and not entertaining, like at all.
I still doubt very much the wisdom of even pushing diversity at all. It’s a huge, huge gamble that may not pay off, and may backfire terribly. As I said before on this blog, the international audiences do not need diversity from Hollywood. Today, the Chinese can make their own big budget films. They just need to actually do so, and they will, with time. They don’t need Hollywood’s pandering. The question is, then, do they want it, and I’m betting that they don’t.
The story is much the same across all of Asia these days, as well as Europe. Bid budget spectacle can be done by dozens of countries.
And if diversity fails… it fails, and hard. Witness the backlash to The Last Jedi. It made money, yes, but at what ultimate cost to the franchise?
But I’m getting close to veering off topic.
For the Oscars, the future looks bleak as hell. I can’t imagine anyone will care much about the nominees of the year 2038, assuming of course the show is even still around by then. 20 years of declining ratings, staring from this year’s record lows, would be unimaginably brutal. IDK, maybe they’ll find some way to desperately hang on by the skin of their teeth, like the newspapers and news magazines. Who knows.
But for me… I won’t care much. To be honest, the only reason I watched myself was to see Emma Stone, because she looked amazing. I probably shouldn’t have, because there was unfortunately like a three hour stretch of the show where I literally didn’t see her at all. It’s a good thing I had other stuff to do, then.
*Yawn*….