There is one group of people who ought to feel soothed by this week’s disastrous Emmys broadcast, and that is the brave souls who are going to be charged with producing the Oscars on February 24 next year. The Emmys set the bar so low—for star power, audience engagement, jokes, and, yes, ratings—that ABC could simply broadcast Ryan Gosling and Michael B. Jordan playing Twister while Lady Gaga sings the winners’ names, and the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences would have a more successful show than its television counterpart.
The unfortunate news for the yet-to-be-named producers of the 91st Academy Awards is that the industry forces that have driven down ratings for awards shows of all types are not about to slow down, no matter how innovative the Academy gets in rethinking its ceremony. Broadcast television simply does not provide the massive stage and media moment it once did.
“We understand the broadcast industry, and people cutting cords, and watching all kinds of content on different platforms,” Academy C.E.O. Dawn Hudson said in an interview earlier this month. “And we are addressing that. We have a lot of engagement with the Oscars on social media, but it’s still disheartening when fans don’t feel it necessary to tune in to the Oscars in the same way.”
The growing sense of broadcast obsolescence is why key people at the Academy, including board of governors members caught in the recent kerfuffle over the very unpopular popular-Oscar category, have begun to talk quietly about bringing their valuable telecast to a streaming service. “Here is the problem, as evidenced in the ratings for the Emmys,” said one board member. “TV is going nowhere. So why don’t we just get our money [from a streaming deal], not worry about ratings, and call it a day?”
ABC holds the rights to the Oscars telecast through 2028, which is eons away in our rapidly changing media landscape, and a deal the Academy cut at a time when it was eager to bolster its coffers for the building of the $400 million Academy Museum, scheduled to open in 2019. The deal seemed like a win-win for both parties when they signed it in 2016. At a time when few events inspire people to watch TV live, the Oscars still did, and ABC was able to charge advertisers up to $2.6 million for a 30-second spot during this year’s show (about half the price for a 30-second ad during this year’s Super Bowl). Meanwhile the Academy, which derives the overwhelming majority of its operating budget from the sale of the telecast rights, had secured reliable funding well into its next decade.
A lot can change in a couple years. Effectively, the Oscars are the tallest in a rapidly shrinking group. While high compared to, say, this year’s Emmys, which drew just over 10 million people, the 26.6 million viewers who watched the 2018 Oscars live represented a 19% decline from 2017, and a 39% drop from the show’s recent height in 2014, when popular studio films like Gravity and American Hustle were in the best-picture race.
The Academy and ABC clearly hope the changes they plan to make to upcoming shows, including trimming the telecast length and moving the show date earlier in the year, will help. And this year’s crop of contending films, like Warner Bros.’s A Star Is Born and Disney’s Black Panther, seem to be the type of box-office performers that will lure a broader audience. But none of that solves the larger problem of audiences turning away from broadcast TV entirely. By 2022, 20% of U.S. adults will have ditched their cable or satellite TV subscriptions, according to eMarketer. By 2028, when the Academy’s deal with ABC expires, who knows where we’ll be? Netflix could own a sizable theater chain by then, and Amazon could be green-lighting shows based on what Alexa overheard Jordan Peele say at breakfast.
“Oh goodness gracious, we are happily partners of ABC,” Academy governor Sid Ganis said, when asked about the prospect of the Oscars some day moving to a streaming service. “We’re not even thinking about beyond that.”
But there is a possible solution whereby the Academy could stay with its longtime partner in producing the Oscars—ABC’s parent company, Disney—and go hurtling into the streaming age, with all of the creative flexibility the format allows. And that is to place the telecast on Disney’s new streaming service, which is set to launch in late 2019 with a slate of shows based on the company’s valuable Star Wars and Marvel properties.
Getting into business with a streaming service is a move that smart creative people in Hollywood, from Shonda Rhimes to Alfonso Cuarón, have made of late, lured by artistic flexibility and a hefty paycheck. Of course, the service most of them have chosen is Netflix, which comes with its massive subscriber base of 130 million people around the world. According to one source familiar with the conversation, over a year ago Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos suggested to some Academy board members the idea of streaming the Oscars on his service. “That, to me, would spell defeat,” one Academy member said of the show moving to a streaming service. “That would show we’ve given up on relevancy.”
The board member disagreed. “Look, we all have a great nostalgia for what the Oscars were,” the governor said. “Modernizing it is really hard. We’re a room of middle-aged to older people who have been doing something a certain way for a long time. That doesn’t mean we should keep on doing it.”
