An Unhealthy Trend at the Oscars

No, I am not referring to the embarrassing flub last Sunday night when the Price Waterhouse accountants handed Warren Beatty the wrong envelope for Best Picture, and La La Land was mistakenly announced as the Best Picture winner.

There is a long-term trend in which the film that wins Best Picture has become less and less a film that many people have actually seen. Consider the numbers. In constant 2017 dollars in the 40 years between 1959 and 1999 the average domestic box office gross for the Best Picture winner was $342 million. Yet, in the 16 years between 2000 and 2016 the average was $139 million. More disturbingly, in the last 7 years from 2009-2016 the average was $67 million, less than 20% of the 1959-1999 average.

Some might herald this trend as evidence of the Academy placing a focus on pure artistic achievement above popular success. I disagree. I think that this trend is unhealthy for the film business in general and certainly toxic for the Academy Awards specifically. Fewer and fewer people watch the award ceremony on television. This year's show attracted only 34 million viewers in the U.S. As recently as 1998, the show drew 55 million viewers--a year when the country's population was 40 million smaller. To the extent that the audience begins to view the Academy Awards as a salon of artists recognizing rarefied and exotic tastes, the ceremony--and by extension the film business in general--will lose its status as an important component of American cultural life. For example, I found the winner of the 2014 Academy Awards, Birdman, nearly unwatchable. The box office receipts of that film suggests that a lot of others felt the same way. In 6 of the last 8 years, the Best Picture winner has earned less than $50 million.

Interestingly, this phenomenon is not entirely due to the Academy recognizing only art house critical favorites. Although Birdman (2014), The Artist (2011), and this year's winner Moonlight (2016) could all be fairly described in this way, the other two films in the sub-$50 million club, The Hurt Locker (2009) and Spotlight (2016) were certainly not art house films. The Hurt Locker is a more or less mainstream war film and Spotlight is a conventional procedural. I suspect that these films suffered from poor marketing campaigns, or, in the case of The Hurt Locker, an reluctance of audiences to go to a film about the Iraq War, which was still an open wound for many in the country.

I certainly don't want to see the Oscars turned into a mere popularity contest along the lines of The People's Choice Awards. But I would like to see Oscar voters at least taking into consideration the cultural impact a film has on the society, while keeping in mind that a film can't have a cultural impact if very few people in the culture are exposed to it.