Let me really quickly go through what I would do to “fix” the Oscars.
Limit the best picture award to five nominees.
That’s it.
The rest of this episode is a look at why the Oscars have become less relevant, if there’s anything Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences can do to reverse course, and what they should do next.
Good News and Bad News – the ratings for last February’s Oscars were the highest they’ve been since the pandemic. Per Variety, “Nielsen’s finalized reporting of Sunday’s Oscars telecast has brought the total from 18.1 to 19.7 million viewers. Rather than a 7% decrease from last year’s show, this indicates a 1% increase. Per ABC, the discrepancy came from a significant portion of younger viewers tuning in via mobile devices and personal computers, which were not represented in Nielsen’s fast national data. The new total is a five-year high for the Oscars in both total viewers and rating among adults age 18-49, which rose from 3.92 to 4.54, a 19% improvement on last year’s 3.82.”
To put the above numbers in context, the show from the year 2000 had 46M people watching, according to a USA Today article titled, “Oscar ratings grew in 2024, here's how they've fared through the years”. Between 2000 and 2020, the US grew by around 50M people. If you look at the line chart on the USA Today website for this article, it approximates the popularity of POGS overtime; moving in one direction, down.
The question is why?
Some of this is cord-cutting. As seen above, the vast majority of viewership of the Oscars comes from people watching the show on traditional television – ABC. For a large swath of the population, this is simply not where the majority of people, especially young people, go for entertainment. One argument is that if the Oscars want to stay relevant, they will need to find a way to reach viewers outside of traditional television – more on this later.
That being said, there are some events that seem to be impervious to this trend. Per its Wikipedia page, the Super Bowl went from 89M average viewers in the US in the year 2000 to 128M average viewers this year, a record. 
If the Oscars are the Super Bowl for movies, the academy has fumbled the ball.
There are differences between the two broadcasts, yes – the Oscars is a television show that is dependent on fans having seen the movies beforehand to care. It’s hard for me to think that there are people (unless they are dragged to watch parties by significant others) who are there without having at least some passing knowledge of what is being nominated. It’s also an industry award where multiple parties are competing in order to get promoted - tactical decisions are made if they will participate or not. There are some years where the biggest stars in the industry decline to attend. 
You really don’t need more than a passing knowledge of football to enjoy the game. If you don’t, the best commercials of the year will be on in about 5 minutes to entertain you. If you can hold out, one of the biggest musical stars in the world will be on at halftime. The NFL has figured out a way to make the Super Bowl a swiss-army knife of entertainment.
For many, the Oscars seems to have lost whatever charm it once had. 
Some of this is probably a byproduct of the digital age. If you only care about what the stars are wearing on the red carpet, there will be coverage of that on YouTube or Instagram, you don’t really need to watch the show; It’ll be on YouTube shortly. If you want to know what a particular actor thinks about a social issue, you don’t need to wonder that either – they’ll tell you on BlueSky or X. The horse race has also gotten less interesting with precursor awards – BAFTA, DGA – making the enterprise largely predictable. People don’t consume movies the way they used to, either – every movie released today is now competing with every movie that is on streaming (which is the majority of movies released in human history), not only whatever else is playing at the multiplex at that time. Film fans now have access to thousands of movies, often for free, through Kanopy and Fandago, as well as other sites. It’s probably unfair for a movie like Past Lives to be compared to something like In the Mood for Love but, given the online communities that now exist, it’s likely nearly impossible for a cinephile not to see this connection. 
The technology giveth and the technology taketh away. Most of that is outside of the control of the academy. It is nearly impossible to think of going back to a time where on demand entertainment is not in the lives of most people. Online communities also give Oscar die-hards a place to congregate and get excited about the show; aside from Reddit, there are at least 4 podcasts that I can think of that focus on past winners and losers, all of whom have at least some fondness for the show and its history.
Most of the reasons, I feel, are cultural. I think there is a probably a “sweet spot” between where the Oscars are now and where they could likely be, if the show was better. A lot of this comes down to attitude.
Have you ever driven to a party and the host, after asking for five bucks, told you how terrible the food was? Or complained about how there was no one cool here? And then apologized, repeatedly? 
The NFL doesn’t have this problem – they focus on the NFL and are as disciplined as any political party could ever hope to be. They don’t apologize for what they are; if you’re watching, they assume that you love football as much as they do. They’re here to talk football – and that’s it (unless Taylor Swift is at the game and they can turn Sunday football into daddy-daughter day, in which case, the NFL will shamelessly cut-away to her every chance it can to draw as many of her fans as it can to the game).
The owners of NFL teams, taken writ large, are truly a hive of scum and villainy. They are some of the richest people in the world and have been alleged to have committed truly terrible crimes and abuses. Let’s not even get started on the players. The number of scandals that teams, players, coaches, and owners have been in is too high for a single podcast to enumerate – yet, this fact is rarely brought up at game time.
The movie industry has its fair share of bad people – just like every other industry. However, they are also spineless – instead of standing up for art and taste, they kowtow. When the diversity of the academy wasn’t what a handful of people on Twitter thought it should be, they completely changed the makeup of the academy, getting rid of some people who had worked in Hollywood for decades. When a single super hero movie didn’t get nominated for best picture, they doubled the number of movies nominated so it wouldn’t happen again. 
Ultimately, I’m much less concerned about the show and more concerned about the awards. I do think that Best Picture should mean something and, if the horse race is a driver of the TV ratings so that the show can go on, so be it.
That being said, I don’t see the Oscars ever being what they once were. I think that the American film industry is in a slow decline and that the quality of the movies and the films that are recognized will get worse overtime. 
Before we move on, a word from our sponsor.
Traditionally, the Oscars have celebrated Hollywood, or to be a bit broader, the American film industry. 
Now, they are increasingly looking outside the United States. Last year, per Deadline, they launched a $500 Million Outreach campaign that is coinciding with the year the Oscar ceremony turns 100, 2028 - “The Academy has become more aggressive with its fundraising programs as revenue from its Oscars telecast has declined. In the fall of 2020, it closed a major $388 million fundraising initiative ahead of the opening of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles. The museum, after several false starts, opened its doors in September 2021.”
Is this going to make the Oscars more or less relevant to Americans? Clearly, it’s not going to help. It could be that the strategy here is to lean on stronger foreign broadcasting rights as ways to offset the declining domestic TV revenue. Per a Hollywood Reporter article from December 2024, “The Oscars do not currently stream online, and Disney would surely like to be able to do so (as would the Academy, surely, seeking younger viewers).”
“Revenue from the Academy Awards and “related activities” rose to $146.6 million in its fiscal 2024, which ended June 30. That is up slightly from $143.5 million in fiscal 2023, with the Academy taking in $137.1 million in fiscal 2022.” The deal with ABC is reported to be worth around 75M a year, so the percentage of the Academy’s total revenue that comes from the Oscars is a little north of half. In other words, they have to find a way to keep the gravy train rolling. 
I think the pre-pandemic number of 30M viewers is probably a doable number. This is from 2019, when Bohemian Rhapsody (which, inexplicably, nearly made a billion dollar at the international box office) was nominated and Green Book won best picture. If this is our north star, how do we get from 20M current viewers back up to 30M? 
I think the first thing to do is to nominate better movies. I should probably take a moment to get into how films are nominated for best picture in the first place. Per an article from NBC 4 Los Angeles titled, “What is preferential ballot voting? Here's how a movie wins ‘Best Picture' Oscar”, there are roughly 10,000 academy voters – all of them are eligible to vote for best picture. From Live About dot com, “In 2011, the Academy changed the rules again: five to ten films would be nominated per year, though to secure a nomination a film had to receive at least 5% of the first-place rankings on nomination ballots.” Not all 10,000 academy voters vote but, if they did, you would have to have as few as 500 put a movie as #1 on their ballot to get it nominated for best picture.
This ties into my idea to only nominate five films. Each member voting lists their top five, unranked. The academy then counts the number of times each film is on the total number of ballots and selects the top 5. These are your top five nominees for best picture.
What does limiting the best picture nominees to five do? First, it eliminates any movies on the fringe that are not going to win - Nightmare Alley, I’m looking in your direction. If your argument is that these are the very best movies that Hollywood has to offer, by only selecting five, there is added pressure on the academy members to pick the right ones. I also think it is a reasonable number of movies to expect the average movie goer (who cares) to see before the show - It’s basically once a week between January and mid-February. Secondly, it offers real separation between the nominees. If the academy wants diversity in the nominees, hard choices will have to be made – do we nominate Avatar or Top Gun? Which indie darling is getting selected this year? Do I really want to nominate two World War II movies in the same year?
The other thing that the Oscars can (and are!) doing is to move the awards off of network television. Per a recent Yahoo! article, “The Oscars ceremony will stream exclusively on YouTube starting in 2029 and will continue through at least 2033. On December 17, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced that it had signed a multi-year deal granting YouTube exclusive global rights to the Oscars.” This move does two things – both of them, at the business level, are smart: it expands the reach of the show itself to a broader, global audience and it allows for those who no longer watch traditional television to access the program. 
Is this a good thing? I have mixed feelings. On one hand, I think it’s clear that traditional, broadcast television is dying. The internet has replaced it and allowed for an environment of on-demand entertainment that is heretofore unmatched. One could, perhaps, make the argument that the quality of scripted television necessitates the high number of advertisements that one must consume to enjoy the programming but, I believe, (and the drop in cable subscribers confirms this) that the consumers, especially younger ones, are gravitating more towards digital on-demand platforms like Netflix and YouTube. Viewing the decision through this lens, the decision was inevitable. A four-year timeframe also allows the academy to, hopefully, think about how a different format can be used to revitalize a show that, at nearly 100 years old, has grown long in the tooth. They will also need this time to be able to educate viewers who are used to watching the show on terrestrial television to gravitate towards YouTube as a platform. Per PBS, “YouTube will effectively be the home to all things Oscars, including red-carpet coverage, the Governors Awards and the Oscar nominations announcement…Financial terms were not disclosed.”
I think having the ancillary programming (Governors Awards, red-carpet, etc) also allows for the academy to expand its reach and use this programming to pad the numbers in terms of views. The other obvious thing it allows them to do is to drop trailers & teasers for the upcoming years’ slate of movies from the major studios. Because YouTube regularly hosts movie trailers, this seems like it’s a win / win: the studios have a dedicated space for trailers so fans can check them out at their leisure and see what the studios are predicting to be the highlights of the next year in movies. YouTube gets big viewing numbers that they can use to drive up ad prices. 
The argument that has been used with the Superbowl – that the premier ads should only air live at game time – has not been true for years, so I don’t see a valid argument for “holding back” trailers for the biggest movies. As we just saw with Christopher Nolan’s trailer for the Odyssey, there is still a lot of buzz for trailers of the biggest movies and I think this deal could work in the academy’s favor to have a dedicated space for them.
The questions I have, and why I’m not super optimistic that this deal will be positive over the long term, is A). Will the academy make the same amount of money from YouTube that they were making with ABC? The Oscars programming is very expensive to produce – you have to hire musicians and performers and operators and a host, etc etc. If the budget for the show starts to drop, it will be almost immediately noticeable on screen. A cheap Oscars ceremony sounds unbearable. B). I mentioned it above but I think this will push the academy to be ever more inclusive in terms of nominating and recognizing foreign films. I mentioned it on the last episode but, should the Netflix deal be approved, movie theaters are likely going to contract, if not disappear completely. If this does happen, there will be a schism: theaters will increasingly just show big budget, tentpole films at the expense of smaller, character driven and low budget films that are more likely to be foreign. This means that fewer and fewer people are going to have an opportunity to see the best picture nominees in a movie theater. This is not good – Per Variety, “Leonardo DiCaprio is worried about the future of moviegoing. During a recent interview with The Times of London, the "Titanic" star questioned if "people still have the appetite" for movie theaters. He also pondered if cinemas would "become silos – like jazz bars?". "It's changing at a lightning speed," DiCaprio said of the film industry. "We're looking at a huge transition. First, documentaries disappeared from cinemas. Now, dramas only get finite time and people wait to see it on streamers. I don't know."
I would argue that perhaps Mr. DiCaprio is putting the spotlight on the wrong group here – the audience has shown that they do still have the appetite for movie theaters. Putting aside the Avatars of the world, Marty Supreme has made nearly $60M (and is still playing) and Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere made $45M at the box office this year. Those numbers aren’t going to make back the money that either of these movies cost because movies cost too much to produce. I haven’t seen Marty Supreme, so I can’t speak to whether that money is on the screen or not but, having seen the Springsteen movie, I can safely say, that the movie should not have cost as much as it did to make. 
That’s not the fault of the audience.
Let’s say that you built a time machine and, for some unknowable reason, you went back to the year 1988 and you heard that Clint Eastwood was making a biopic of Charlie Parker (which he did – it’s called Bird) and you wanted to jump on the bandwagon. Let’s assume you have a very strong memory, to the point where you can recall key details of the last biopic that you saw before building your time machine (which was Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere), so you recreate Scott Cooper’s script and you convince a studio to make your movie. The cost of making this movie (let’s call it Nebraska ’82) would be like $10M less, in today’s dollars, so instead of the movie being $55M and having a box office of $45M (which is what happened today), in today’s dollars, assuming it would perform the same with audiences, the movie would have grossed $45M and cost $45M. Because of Hollywood accounting this movie would not break even at the box office but would have a chance of turning a profit after its initial run ends through streaming, PVOD, physical media, and rental revenues. If you were expecting a movie about a rock star, while making one of the least commercially successful records of his career, coming to terms with his strained relationship with his father and his own growing depression, to make $300M, you probably weren’t being realistic with your expectations.
I understand that special effects are becoming more and more common in big budget movies but it’s unclear to me, unless there are still COVID-era provisions that are still in effect today, why something that could have been made nearly 40 years ago costs so much more today (in real dollars) than it did then.
The obvious place to look is the growth of movie star salaries.
To put DiCaprio under the spotlight, One Battle After Another – a movie I still have not seen and likely will not unless it wins best picture (which, at this point, seems likely) – costs, per Wikipedia, between $130 and $175 Million dollars. To be clear, I don’t know how much of that is DiCaprio’s salary. Back in October, Variety wrote, “Though the global haul of $140 million is impressive for a film that’s original, R-rated and nearly three hours long, One Battle requires roughly $300 million to break even,” the Variety report noted. “That’s because Warner Bros. spent more than $130 million on production and $70 million on promotional efforts, and ticket sales are typically split 50-50 between studios and theater operators.” The box office today is around $205M, per Wikipedia, so its around 100M in the hole. Now, if it wins best picture, I’m sure that the movie will make more in streaming and ancillary revenue than the Springsteen picture. That being said, it begs the question – is the higher cost of these movies simply the cost of hiring named actors? If so, do the Avatar movies prove that A-list actors are no longer necessary to drive boffo box office?
With the possibility of the Warner Brothers merger looming large, I think the real answer is that the industry is in flux and we don’t yet know what the “new normal” will be. I still think it is likely, sadly, that we will continue to see movie theaters declining – I think the academy awards works best when they are celebrating movies that people have seen. When the average person looks at the list of nominees has seen none of the movies (and has no interest in seeing any of them) that is a real problem, at least from an American perspective. It’s possible that the global audience will expand to make up for the drop-off in American eyeballs. That being said, I have no idea of the parameters of the deal – does the academy get a fixed amount? Is it tied to viewers? Is it tied to minutes viewed? Without these details it is hard to tell whether the deal is good or bad for either party.
To leave with a silver lining, one of the possible upsides of the YouTube deal is that there is an opportunity, in the lead up to the Oscars from nomination to the actual show, to get people hyped about the films nominated – either through crew and director interviews or clips, in a way that was not present before. 
Before I let you go, here is my ranking of the movies I saw that were released in 2025 – I’m going to leave out watching Perfect Blue, because that was a theatrical re-release, and Soderbergh’s Prescence or Anaconda, which I plan on watching later today or next weekend. From worst to first:
The worst:
The Monkey – Number 6 – I saw this at home and maybe if I watched it with a crowd of people who were on the same wavelength I would have liked it more. The humor was off for me. I just didn’t find it fun. Some of the music choices were inspired but otherwise, I felt this was a step down from what Osgood Perkins is capable of. If you still haven’t seen it, I would highly recommend his debut, The Black Coat’s Daughter.
Number 5 - The Woman in the Yard – Saw this in the movie theater and, while I missed the first few minutes, I felt it was a solid story about trauma and grief with some surrealist elements that I enjoyed. The story could have probably been told more clearly but I enjoyed it while I watched it, even if I didn’t think much of it later.
Number 4 – Superman – The projectionist in the theater didn’t focus the picture so the screen looked slightly off the whole time, which is not James Gunn’s fault. I enjoyed some bits of it – especially the cutting out of the origin story. The costumes were cool. The biggest problem I had with the movie was that it felt like it was trying to tell multiple stories at once and everything then felt short-changed – the world felt overstuffed and also somehow empty. I also felt the humor was forced and really didn’t work. The CGI was awful for a movie that probably cost north of $200M to make – when I talk about movies that look like the money is not on the screen, this is one of the biggest culprits. 
Number 3 – Avatar: Fire and Ash – Maybe it’s because someone at my theater read James Cameron’s letter about how to project his movie but, more likely, its because James Cameron knows how to spend a lot of money and make sure that almost all of it is on the screen but this movie looks amazing and makes Superman look like a five year old playing with sock puppets by comparison. The story is bland but the action sequences are a lot of fun. Most of the time they distract you from the terrible and repetitive dialogue. Most of the time. At this point, you know what you’re getting from an Avatar movie – shut your brain off and enjoy the ride. 
Number 2 – Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere – I think the more you like the Nebraska record the more you’ll like this movie. I enjoyed it quite a bit even if it didn’t 100% land. I think the movie is very careful to not explain what mental health struggles Springsteen’s dad is dealing with. While this may be historically accurate (I’m not sure if he ever received a formal diagnosis of what some have speculated to be bi-polar disorder, possibly exasperated by PTSD), not mentioning it in the movie made the impact of the struggle of Springsteen to relate to his dad harder for me, the audience, to understand. I also felt like the movie elided over the relationship the manufacturing exodus of the early 1980s had on Springsteen’s writing of Nebraska – it’s clearly there in the record. I enjoyed his relationship with the composite girlfriend and his manager. I liked the tunes. I had a good time if not necessarily a fun one.
Finally, my number one movie of the year, Eddington. This is also not a fun movie. I was surprised how much critics, especially liberal critics, really hated this movie. Some said that it was shallow and unoriginal in how it dealt with how Aster dealt with his characters. Unlike Superman where everything felt like everything all the time, Aster knows how to weave in disparate elements into the movie and still make them feel organic. Critics want everything – they want a movie that talks about real social issues but they also only want that movie if it clearly (and forcefully and exclusively) supports their own underlining assumptions and beliefs. The movie is political and is saying things about violence and hypocrisy and the media and capitalism but it doesn’t hold your hand - you have to sit and think about the movie after watching it. In my opinion, this is the best poster (and movie) of the year – it’s a black and white image of several buffalo falling off a cliff; its unclear if they are following their leader or are independently running off the cliff. The movie asks, “are we being led off a cliff and if so, by whom?”. I found it to be the most thought-provoking movie of the year and while the last 20 minutes or so don’t fully work and everything is not fully explained, I would recommend it to anyone who complains that they just don’t make movies for adults anymore.
Thank you for listening to this episode of Elegant Ramblings. If you’ve enjoyed what you’ve heard, please consider liking and subscribing to the channel on iTunes or YouTube. You’ll be able to find show notes there. Hope you enjoyed. Bye for now.