A Four-Week-Late Oscar Take

It is evidence of my year-end frazzled state of mind that when Friend of the Blog Jaime asked me on New Year’s Eve what I made of the recent announcement that the Academy Awards would be leaving broadcast television in 2029 to stream exclusively on YouTube TV that I did not really have an answer because I had not really given it any consideration. I was frazzled, and just plain burned out, but also, when I first saw the news, I also just figuratively shrugged from an admitted air of inevitability. After all, we live in a world where cable and satellite television is becoming increasingly antiquated. The winners of both Outstanding Comedy Series and Outstanding Drama Series – “The Studio” and “The Pitt,” respectively – at last year’s Primetime Emmy Awards were streaming series, and if you wanted to watch the Bears/Packers NFL playoff game on Saturday night, you had to have Amazon Prime, or else. Indeed, not long after the Oscar news, media observers were already suggesting it was just a matter of time before the mother of all live events, the old AFL-NFL World Championship Game, goes streaming too. 

Jaime was optimistic about the news, and once I thought about it, and once I worked through my middle-aged, Gen-X, three-channel era angst, I felt optimistic too. The Oscars have spent at least a decade apologizing for themselves, to paraphrase The New Yorker’s perturbable Richard Brody, which is why they are always trying to reinvent the wheel, taking draconian measures to shorten the length of acceptance speeches, shunting various awards off air, eliminating the honorary awards altogether by giving them their own off-air ceremony, and adding various forms of unrelated razzle dazzle at the expense of celebrating the whole reason we are watching in the first place. It was the late William Goldman who was always went against the grain by arguing the Oscars were not too long but too short, that rather than just showing a smattering of brief clips of nominated movies, the telecast should show fuller clips and truly celebrate the nominees rather than pay mere lip service between commercials.

Goldman’s vision might just be possible by moving the telecast to streaming, providing them a chance for liberation, as Clayton Davis put it for Variety, noting that the YouTube TV deal includes not just the ceremony but the red-carpet coverage and even the Governors Ball afterwards. It suggests Oscar Sunday as something akin to Inauguration Day coverage, the whole shebang, giving viewers the opportunity to tune in and tune out and tune in and tune out, etc., eavesdropping on the whole big affair. Mark Harris, one of our pre-eminent Oscar-ologists, seemed cautiously hopeful on the New Twitter, writing that the best-case scenario was the Oscar show being true to itself, glory hallelujah, but the worst-case scenarios being a desperate attempt to, quote-unquote, youthify. What such youthifying would mean, he didn’t really say, probably because as an Old Person, like me, he doesn’t really know. Maybe it means an alternate Nickelodeon Slimetime Oscar-cast, or maybe it means an alternate cast for everybody hosted by Drinks With Broads, or maybe it means a parade of TikTok influencers. I mean, what were Billy Crystal’s old Oscar opening numbers if not proto-TikTok videos?

The Olympics were another ancient broadcast TV entity that resisted the digital world for ages and, on some level, as an old-timer Olympics enthusiast, I understood it. The appeal of the Games was partly monocultural, that when you sat down to watch it in primetime, you were watching along with the rest of the world, or at least, the rest of America. That is why the deliberate minimization of coverage, ironically, made it feel bigger, and I assume that NBC feared providing an all-access digital pass would render the event too diffuse. Instead, by moving coverage of every single event online to their streaming platform Peacock, the exact opposite has happened, rendering the Games what they always have been but viewers at home have never truly been able to fully comprehend: that is, a virtual sporting kaleidoscope. True, NBC has retained a traditional evening broadcast for anyone who might not choose to pay for Peacock, and I do not necessarily like the idea of the Oscars freezing out anyone who would rather not shill out for YouTube TV. But if streaming has made the Olympics feel bigger than ever before, my hope is that if the Oscars do this right, they will come to feel that way too.