Ross Douthat, New York Times, March 7, 2018
Image from article, with caption: Jimmy Kimmel joking in his opening monologue about the Oscar statue
Excerpt:
There are conservatives, including the president of the United States, who take a special kind of glee in the declining ratings for the Academy Awards, which hit an all-time low this weekend under the stewardship of Jimmy Kimmel and in the shadow of hideous revelations about the film industry’s tolerance for rape.
You’ll get no glee from me. The decline of the Oscars is overdetermined: It’s nobody’s fault and everybody’s, shaped by the same trends driving down Big Event ratings all over and the same diversification of tastes and values and ideas, plus all the technological and economic shifts undercutting the old studio business models, all the inevitably shortsighted choices made by philistines in SoCal corporate suites, and all of our collective decisions to watch or not to watch what Hollywood churns out.
But it is still a decline to be regretted, a loss not only of entertainment and spectacle but also of the cultural common ground [JB emphasis] that our last mass-market art form once supplied. ...
[O]f course a certain kind of pulp entertainment will always tend to skew right-wing. But the more the only plausible Oscar nominees in terms of cinematic quality are passion projects and message movies — the kind of movies, to quote Kimmel, that are made “to annoy Mike Pence” — the more the film industry’s inevitable liberalism seems less one reliable theme of Oscar season than the symphony entire.
For some people in the movie business and the press that covers it, this may seem like a happy evolution, a shift toward more of a vanguard role in pursuing social change, with fewer political compromises and greater moral clarity in what messages the academy offers to the world.
But even if, as is fervently hoped, we are entering an age of stronger minority and female representation in cinema, without the mass audience that high-middle-brow cinema once enjoyed that representation’s influence on the American imagination will be limited. ... No matter how much more enlightened the movie industry becomes, what was 20th-century America’s most influential and unifying mass art form is increasingly a business of niche markets and lowest-narrative-denominator blockbusters… and it is not only conservatives who might reasonably regret that shift.
Like many cultural rituals the Oscars are peculiar and arbitrary and frequently absurd, but like many they have supplied a thread of unity and memory and shared experience for the millions who watch them every year. For the show to become a boutique affair for American liberals that’s sponsored by a globalized superhero content provider is not, I think, a happy change — and for all that it seems overdetermined and inevitable, it’s a transformation that filmmakers and moviegoers and academy members, in all their various ways, should still make an effort to resist.