High Brow Nominees to Equal Low Ratings?

Ever since the nominees for the 81st Academy Awards were announced yesterday, there has been no shortage of reading material. One article that has caught my eye is a post by Steve Mason at Big Hollywood, who predicts that the lack of The Dark Knight and other popular names on the nominee roster will send Oscar Night ratings plunging down to new depths. His reasoning is that since so few of those in the race are household names, the interest level among the general public is minimal at best. To back up his argument, Mason has compiled statistics for the last ten years of Oscar Broadcasts and compares the combined box office receipts for the five contenders for Best Picture to the number of people who tuned in to see the winner announced. The results are enlightening. While the numbers don't fit perfectly into the pattern, the general trend is the higher the revenue of the nominees, the more people who watch the Academy Awards. The most obvious example is the year when Titanic was in the running; an astronomical 57.2 million people watched the film carry off 11 awards, 10.7 million more people then watched the second highest watched broadcast of the set, when American Beauty beat out The Green Mile, The Sixth Sense, The Insider, and The Cider House Rules. Titanic, incidentally was going up against L.A. Confidential, The Full Monty, Good Will Hunting, and As Good as it Gets, a sizable competition.

Recent years have seen a decline in Oscar viewership; while ten years ago around 45 million people watched the ceremony, that number is down to close to 30 million. What attributes for the decline? Over all, I'm inclined to agree with Mason that since no one knows who is nominated, no one cares who wins. But that doesn't help explain the Oscars of 2002, when Chicago beat out Gangs of New York, The Hours, the Pianist, and Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers for Best Picture, but only gathered together 33 million people, a small wrinkle in the box office vs ratings theory. What else could explain the nosedive? There is something to be said for the overlong duration of the show, as well as the recent straying from a family-friendly format. While I remember very little about the Oscars of ten years ago, I do remember that it was something my family had turned on and watched with some interest. It seems to me at least that in recent years, the Oscars have become edgier, with more risque jokes and language; throw in the performance of Best Song nominee "It's Hard Out Here For a Pimp" and one might be on to at least one reason viewers are fleeing for the hills.

The Academy is hoping to turn things around this year. Bill Condon and Larry Mark, newly engaged by the Academy to produce the show, revealed in December that they were hiring actor Hugh Jackman to play host. It was a surprising leap from the usual comedian that handles the job, but Condon and Mark pointed out that Jackman won an Emmy for hosting the Tony awards, a fact that certainly counts in his favor. But whether the new producers have a huge task ahead of them if they're to repair the reputation of the Oscars, particularly in light of the facts discussed above.

To conclude these thoughts, I leave you with a U.S.A. Today article from only a few days ago that predicted that The Dark Knight would save the Oscars from a ratings nightmare. Obviously, there's a tiny flaw in their plan.