The 91st Academy Awards will broadcast on Feb. 24, and it has been one problem after another. It all started back in February, when the Academy announced it would be adding a Most Popular film category to its traditional 24 categories. People got angry, so it was cut. Then, the Academy announced that acclaimed comedian Kevin Hart would be hosting the event. Unfortunately, similar to the James Gunn situation in August 2018, former tweets of homophobic slurs that Hart made in several stand-up specials in the early 2010s caused the Academy to force him to apologise or lose the gig, causing Hart to step down.

Its most recent blunder came from it announcing that, to reduce the overall runtime of the ceremony, it would be cutting four categories from the live broadcast and announcing them during the commercial breaks. That sounded fine in conception, except for the fact that the categories announced to be cut included cinematography and editing, only the two most fundamentally important assets of filmmaking. People got mad and complained, causing Academy President Jon Bailey to, of course, backtrack and state that they would not be doing this and that all four categories that were originally cut would be back on the livestream.

            This entire catastrophe stems from the fact that the ratings for the live event have been going down in record numbers since 2014. Besides just being a simple numbers problem, a bigger issue seems to stem from an inherent want to be relevant. Social media has become an enemy to a lot of traditional media formats, but a majority of people simply do not care. The Oscars have always been exclusively for film fans, but the fact of the matter is that, in terms of keeping up with the rest of the population who really just want to tune in to watch a fun show, the Oscars have not kept with the times. It has gotten so bad that it feels as if people are watching them more so for the blunders rather than to see who actually wins.

            While there is clearly no simple fix to these issues, the weird thing is that by constantly screwing up with their announcements and all the subsequent backlash, the Oscars seem to be back in the topic of conversation. If they want to stay around for a while and avoid further incidents like this, they need to make a conscious effort to lean into more of the social media angle, as well as get a better public relations team. Some other suggestions may include polls on screen that allow people to have the perception they are participating in the ceremony via Twitter polls. A definite must, however, is better host selection and writing staff. The hosts of the last eight years now have been passable, mediocre, trying too hard, shoved in a social message and just straight up falling flat on their faces. Whatever the case may be, the Oscars have to start making these changes now, or similar to the Super Bowl, face obscurity much sooner than they realized.

photo provided by analogicus via pixabay