Oscars Broadcast Plummets to 9.8 Million Viewers, Half of Last Year’s Show, and One Quarter of the Ratings from Seven Years Ago

by Ace

Gee I wonder why.
 
And no, it’s not all about the pandemic. It’s true that few movies came out last year, but the Oscars have never primarily been about one year’s movies.
 
They’ve been about celebrating celebrity and fame.
 
And for some reason, people don’t care about famous people reading lines written for them by less-famous people any more.

The prestigious awards show drew an average of 9.8 million viewers for ABC on Sunday, according to early Nielsen numbers. That’s 58% below the ratings from last year’s show, the previous lowest-rated Oscars, which brought in in 23.6 million viewers.The show remains one of the most-watched broadcast events, but its viewership represents a steep drop from what the show used to bring in. Just seven years ago, the Oscars nabbed more than 40 million viewers.

The telecast itself was widely panned for being boring and preachy.

Although viewership dropped considerably, Lowry added, “It will be hard to separate the extent to which that was beyond the producers’ control, as opposed to being at least partly due to a telecast that too often felt like a public television pledge drive.”

Well, the Oscars are going to reflect the movies Hollywood is making, and Hollywood is making mostly #Woke Afterschool Specials for a public that is no longer buying their bullshit.
 
Here’s one bad review:

If you opened the window and listened closely Sunday night, you could hear it: the sound of millions of remote controls changing the channel during the 2021 Oscars.And after last night’s debacle — the worst Academy Awards of my lifetime — they may never return.
 
Producer Steven Soderbergh, the man who directed “Traffic” and “Erin Brockovich,” among many other fine films, helmed the broadcast and was determined to make it more intimate and cinematic than usual. All right, as a movie critic, I’ll play ball.
 
“Steven Soderbergh’s The Oscars” gets 1 star. The night was nearly non-stop drudgery, zero humor and a format that tried even the most resolute of attention spans.
 
…The Academy believes in the movies so much, they made Best Picture the third-to-last category of the night (“Nomadland” won). The producers clearly assumed the late Chadwick Boseman would win Best Actor, the final award presented, and it would be moving and historic. Well, he didn’t. The night ended without a winner’s speech from Anthony Hopkins (“The Father”). Imbeciles.
 



 
Meanwhile, our eyes couldn’t take this self-righteous snooze-fest. The camera work was purposefully shaky, the acceptance speeches were shot pretentiously off-center and the cinematic frame-rate robbed this news event of electricity. They could make a buck selling the telecast as a smartphone sleep-improvement app.

The winners were Checkbox Diversity Woke.

“I can picture Black trans women standing up here, and Asian sisters. And our Latina sisters, and indigenous women. And I know that one day it won’t be unusual or groundbreaking — it will just be normal,” she said.

One actor decided to honor… the domestic terrorism criminal gang the Black Panthers. He’d starred in a movie celebrating that terrorist group.

During his speech, after he thanked the cast, crew and producers behind “Judas and the Black Messiah,” Kaluuya paid tribute to Hampton and the entire Black Panther party.”What a man,” Kaluuya said of Hampton on stage. “What a man. How blessed we are that we lived in a lifetime where he existed. You know what I mean? Thank you for your light. He was on this earth for 21 years, and he found a way to feed kids breakfast. Educate kids, give free medical care, against all the odds. He showed me, he taught me, him, Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, the Black Panther party, they showed me how to love myself, and with that love, they overflowed it to the Black community and other communities.”

Last night I saw that some YouTubers were putting on “Anti-Oscar Party” shows, and I considered putting up a thread.
 
But I didn’t, because I thought: Do they even care anymore?
 
Because I don’t, myself.
 
This sort of stuff used to bother me. It doesn’t any longer.
 
When you break up with someone — or break up with an industry, or a hobby — at first you’re angry about the alienating direction the industry or hobby is taking, and you complain about it.
 
The more intensely you complain, however, the more you show that you still care.
 
At some point, you stop complaining.
 
That doesn’t mean you’ve accepted the industry turning woke.
 
That means that you now don’t even care that it’s turned woke — it’s out of your life, and you care about it as much as the person you broke up with four break-ups ago.

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