George Bradley loved watching the Academy Awards. The 28-year-old Brit is now living in San Diego, he will return home late at night.
Although he is now in the right time zone, he is not just interested in Oscar 2021, and this is mainly due to the epidemic.
“The increasing dominance of streaming services has kept me away from the Oscars,” he said. “When you recognize a film from the silver screen, you don’t get that weird feeling from it.”
Whether you watch out of love, because you like to hate or quit like Bradley, the award show has closed the Coronovirus theaters and closed the live performance. But ratings for award nights went well before COVID-19 took over.
For most of this century, the Oscars attracted 35 million to 45 million viewers, often behind the Super Bowl. Last year, just before the epidemic was declared, Hostless Telecast on ABC was watched by its youngest audience, 23.6 million viewers, down 20 percent from the first year.
The Golden Globe reached 6.9 million viewers more than a year later in the epidemic, down 64% from the previous year, and barely in 2008, a writer’s strike led NBC to a news conference announcing the winners Forced to give air. According to the Nielsen Company, the show had 18.4 million viewers in pre-lockdown last year.
In March, Grammy producers avoided the zoom weirdness of other award shows and staged performances by some of the industry’s biggest stars – to no avail. CBS Telecast reached 9.2 million viewers, both television and streaming, the lowest number on record and a 51% drop from 2020, Niels said.
John Benardo, 52, in Boca Raton, Florida, is a film buff, film school graduate and screenwriter, and runs a videography business mostly for corporate clients. This year is a no-go for the Oscars.
“I love movies and aspire to be on the stage someday getting my own award Oscar,” he said. “I watch each year and take it, enter competitions where I try to pick the winners and try to watch all the movies. But something has changed this year.”
To begin with, he has not seen a single film nominated in any of the categories.
“Maybe I’ll watch the ‘Zach Snyder Justice League’ instead. It might be shorter,” Benardo joked about the Oscar show.
Like other award shows, the Oscar telecast was pushed back due to epidemic restrictions and security concerns. The show had already been postponed three times in history, but never before. Organizers scheduled it for 25 April last June, as opposed to its usual slot in February or early March.
Too much content = rewards show fatigue
Calculate that among other driving forces behind Oscar’s fatigue. Another, according to former fans of the show, is to watch nominated movies on the small screen and keep up with when and where they are available on streaming and on-demand services. This is a big stigma for some.
The 62-year-old Priscilla Visintine Academy lived in St. Louis, Missouri to watch the awards. She attended watch parties every year, usually wearing all manner of clothes for the occasion.
“Certainly the shuttering of theaters caused my lack of interest this year,” she said. “I had no understanding of Oscar Buzz.”
Not all deathbirds have given up their favorite award shows.
In Knoxville, Tennessee, 50-year-old Jennifer Rice and her 22-year-old son, Jordan, have raced for years to watch several nominated films. In previous years, it was his “February Madness”, he said, and he kept charts to document his predictions. Even he got to attend the Oscars in 2019 through his work for a beauty company at the time.
“My other two children, ages 25 and 19, are not interested in the Oscars. This is just something special for Jordan and I, ”said Rice. “The Oscars really inspire us to watch films that we never had chosen. I am not as excited this year, but we are trying to see everything before the awards ceremony. “
Note that the spans are pushed to the maximum
As real-life hardship intensifies for many viewers, from food-insecurity and job disruption to isolation to lockdown and parenting conflicts, the awards show less escapism and dazzle-dazzle than the former, often pre-. Display and zoom are dependent on the box. For the candidates. Furthermore, the data show little interest among the younger generation for placement television in general.
A lover of films and a filmmaker himself, 22-year-old Pierre Subeh of Orlando, Florida, stopped watching the Oscars in 2019.
“We can hardly live in a 15-second ticktock. How are we expected to sit by the four-hour awards ceremony filled with advertisements and the old offensive jokes? We are living in a time of content curation. We need algorithms to find out what we want to see and give us the best performance, ”he said.
As a Muslim, Middle Eastern immigrant, Subeh also sees less than incorporating his culture into a mainstream film, with Oscar alone on stage.
“We only mention when Aladdin is brought. I do not feel inspired to gather my family on Sunday through a four-hour awards ceremony that does not mention anything about our culture and religion. As Muslims, we make up about 25% of the world’s population, ”he said.
John Nikam, 55, at Cannes, teaches screenwriting at the University of Kansas. He is a filmmaker, went to film school and worked as a film critic. He and his wife hosted an annual Oscar party, which had 30 guests, including a betting pool on the winners for money and prizes. It will be familial only this year due to the epidemic, but betting continues.
Not everyone is giving Oscars
And watching all the top movies at home? For the most part, he said, “it was less satisfying.” Less satisfactory for dumping the Oscar telecast?
“I haven’t won an Oscar since 45 years ago. I will watch it every minute, ”Nikum said.
In Medford, New Jersey, 65-year-old Deb Madison will also be watching, as he has been since he was a child and his mother first took him to the movies.
In 2018, on an RV road trip with her husband, she made a place to roam the city by bike with her in Carlsbad, New Mexico. The ride was back in the dark of the pitch. Another year, while she was working at a reception at a huge party in Philadelphia on Oscar night, the Coordinators laid out the cable and provided her with a small TV hidden under the Welcome Desk, so she could tune in.
Madison said that this year, the effort to keep well-known people connected to the house has boosted their enthusiasm.
“I’m a sucker for red carpets and gowns and ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe she’s wearing this.’ Another thing is that I don’t have to see these actors in my home environment, “she said with a laugh.” This year, if I missed it, it wouldn’t be sad. No one will need cabling this year. But I still like movies. “
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