re: Oscars Viewership Sinks to New Low With 23.6 Million Viewers

The funny thing is, as much as people bash the Academy for misogyny and racism, the Oscars kill themselves to make it as inclusive as possible. Outside of the director and acting categories, the stage had a steady flow of women and minorities as winners and performers. Everything that they can control is inclusive. It's the voting actors and directors who are keeping those categories white and male.

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Award shows do not register as pop culture events anymore. They are a relic from a different media age.

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There isn't a single award show that is must see tv for me. I couldn't care less.

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Hell I live in Austin, really wanted to watch Jojo Rabbit and it didn't even play here. It was even worse the years prior. At least this year there were some mainstream noms like Once Upon a Time and 1917.

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I call 100% bullshite here. I live in Nashville, and every single movie that gets more than a NY/LA release comes to Nashville. Large, small, American, Bollywood. It doesnt matter. They all place somewhere in the metro Nashville area. Its going to be like that in all other major cities.

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Hell I live in Austin, really wanted to watch Jojo Rabbit and it didn't even play here.

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No way thats possible. Every theater in Shreveport/Bossier had it. And this place doesnt show any under the radar films.

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The biggest audience isn't just women, it's older white women.

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I’m a 47 yo white woman. I used to get excited about the Oscars- sometimes had get togethers, tried to watch most of the nominated ones before... Loved the whole froo froo of it all.

I really couldn’t care less now. I think it’s a variety of reasons- I stopped caring about Hollywood folks, part of that is just simply getting older, part of that due to the superiority complex of stars and the sometimes preaching.

Then there’s just so much good television now. I’ve probably gone to the movies 3 times in the past year. I’d rather watch an episodic show than sit 2 hours in a theater.

There’s just not any pull for me to watch award shows anymore.

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Your biggest audience is women. It's reductive, but it's the Female Super Bowl. And what were you offering your core audience? You passed over Little Women and didn't nominate The Farewell. The Best Actress race was poor this year. Do more to attract your core audience.

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There is an inherent contradiction the Oscars have not been able to solve: the moviegoing audience is mostly young males, but the awards show audience is mostly females.

Enlarging the number of BP nominees was an attempt to deal with this.

The Oscars are 90+ years old. They were invented for a time when women decided what the entire family would go see. MGM studio head L.B. Mayer and production chief Irving Thalberg both believed women made 2/3 of the film choosing decisions.

That changed with the advent of TV in the '50s. The female audience shifted to TV and the studios never figured out a way to get them back. I've never seen the idea addressed anywhere, but I'm convinced the rise of the movie western in the '50s, often attributed to the cold war, was in fact as much if not more due to the rise in importance of the male demo, which sought out an action genre rather than the "women's pictures" so beloved of Mayer and Thalberg.

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23.6 Million Viewers

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Omg what a small number. People are really getting to them by not watching.

That's probably the biggest reason.

And frankly nobody wants to listen to these smug acceptance speeches...

And people frankly don't really like Hollywood right now.

People say...why can't you separate politics from the art?

Why can't Hollywood? Why is the onus on the viewer? We're the ones paying for this shite-show.

There wer some good movies.
But there also are tons of award shows
For people to watch.