How the Oscars Failed the Entertainment Industry

It should have been the biggest night of the year for celebrating filmmaking. It's been a hard year for the industry, but there are finally some hopeful signs starting to emerge. So the Academy Awards could have used the year's best films and the industry's best talent to really get people excited about movies again. But they didn't.

Of course, I know there are certain things you always expect in an awards show. The speeches will always go long. Too many people will care too much about what celebrities wear. But before the pandemic, those speeches were balanced by a big stage, lots of fanfare and a chance to actually celebrate the movies. Instead of that, the Oscars this year took a strange detour through awkwardly staged award presentations and a random "guess the song" trivia game that ended in Glenn Close doing an impromptu/maybe staged dance. The whole thing felt a bit like being invited to someone else's party where they were trying really hard to make it fun so you don't leave.

It's understandable that the show would try to compensate for it's smaller venue and rotating audience. The sad part is, they could have leaned on the one thing that they uniquely had access to: the movies themselves. Award after award was presented this year with no chance for the audience to learn anything about the films that were winning. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom won for Best Costume and Best Makeup and Hairstyling - but there were no images of hair, makeup or costumes shown. Tenet won for Best Visual Effects, but again we didn't see any of them. After a year of musicians streaming live from their home studios, even the nominees for Best Song were not performed.

For the big awards, like Best Actor, the performances were described, but not shown. I never realized how much I enjoyed seeing those clips until they removed them. Watching short clips offer the important chance to really get to know the films. Finally for Best Picture, the show did incorporate some clips from the actual films themselves, but why not do this throughout the show? Arguably, the primary job of the Academy Awards should be to inspire more people to go and see films. By this measure, it's hard to judge the show as anything but a failure.

Movies biggest night, ironically, forgot to feature the movies. As a result they gave us more of what we have had over the last year. A cut down virtual replacement to the experience we really wanted in the first place.