Last year’s Oscars had a free pass. This year’s Oscars is under a fierce and unforgiving spotlight.
And that’s a big problem, part of it external and part of it self-inflicted, for the Academy, and ABC and the Oscar show producers.
In 2021, the COVID-19 pandemic had stopped theatrical exhibition, sent most awards shows to virtual formats and caused TV ratings for those shows to drop by 50% or more from previous years. Everybody knew that the Oscar viewership would be significantly less than the 24 million that had made 2020 the least-watched Oscars ever. And that gave producers Steven Soderbergh, Stacey Snider and Jesse Collins license to mess with the show, to move it into a train station, mix things up and make it look different, with no expectation that the ratings would be anything but terrible.