Like most (all?) of you, I'm not watching the Academy Awards tomorrow night. Haven't even set the ol' TiVo, though I might just in case I hear about one or two memorable moments. Then again, if there are any, they'll be viewable a hundred places on the Internet by Midnight so maybe I needn't bother.
That's one reason why a record low number of folks tune in the ceremony with each passing year. If you scan the 'net for articles, you can probably find eight dozen other reasons, all of them valid to some degree. At the top of my list would be that people these days are more conscious than ever of the financial end of films. Once you know that Will Smith got $40,000,000 for starring in King Richard, it's hard to get that excited over whether he wins or loses as Best Actor. Is anyone going to feel sorry for him if he doesn't?
There's also a certain pomp, circumstance and phoniness to watch all these rich, famous people giving honors to each other. No matter how humble some of the speeches try to be, there's always that air of Jerry Lewis explaining how people in show business are the greatest human beings and so are deserving of more reverence.
I think also in the era of videogames and YouTube and all the other forms of entertainment we now have, movies are just not as important. They also don't have the sense of timeliness they once had. We're all aware: Every movie we want to see will always be there. I don't have to go to theaters — increasingly, even movie lovers don't — and I don't have to see them now. I have not seen any — not a one — of the Marvel movies since the first X-Men film. If and when I want to, I can. Most people don't watch The Tony Awards because they haven't seen any of the nominated shows. It's becoming the same way with the Oscars.
And I could go on and on about this until some orchestra plays me off. I just think that for the last decade or three, the world has steadily been losing interest in awards ceremonies. We heard a lot about how one host might attract more viewers than another, or how one ceremony wasn't as well-produced as another.
In hindsight, I think it's easier to see that those concerns were ignoring the core issue: People have just lost their interest in this kind of thing, just like they lost interest in beauty pageants. And westerns on TV. And Playboy magazine. And Donkey Kong and water beds and Cabbage Patch Dolls and circuses and video rental shops and Toys R Us and a long, long list of other things we could all itemize. At the very least, we have matters to think about that impact us more.