They've tried everything to make the Academy Awards a must-see, vital TV event. Everything. Now they've got it, without trying – #OscarsSoWhite.
"They" are the Academy, broadcaster ABC and the show's producers. And they've had a problem on their hands for more than a decade.
The 70th Academy Awards in 1998, with Billy Crystal as host and Titanic as the big movie, had 57.25 million viewers in the United States. Since then, the number of people watching – or caring – has been in steady decline. The viewer numbers go down a bit and up a bit, but 57 million has never been reached again.
The 80th Academy Awards in 2008, with Jon Stewart as host and No Country for Old Men the big winner for Best Picture, had 31.76 million viewers.
First, the awards were moved from the third week of March to the end of February, when more people are watching TV. Then the awards were moved from Monday to Sunday, the most-watched night of TV during the week.
And then the experiments with the hosting gig began. A pair of young actors instead of an elderly comedian. Who can forget James Franco and Anne Hathaway? Well, very forgettable, actually. Jon Stewart did it twice but failed to bring along the sharp edge of Daily Show humour. Seth MacFarlane hosted and failed with the funny.
And then it happened – outrage over the lack of diversity among nominees at the Oscars made it interesting again. Chris Rock was already slated to host and he, along with the Academy and ABC, were given the bountiful gift of controversy.
Last week, according to multiple reports, Academy Awards co-producer Reginald Hudlin confirmed that Rock will not be dropping out of the show (airing Feb. 28 on ABC and CTV). In fact, when outrage continued to sizzle, with Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith declaring they'd boycott the event, Rock threw out his jokes and started working on a new script.
"Chris is thorough," Hudlin said. "He's that brilliant, and I have 1,000 per cent confidence that he will deliver something that people will be talking about for weeks." That's Hollywood talk but in this rare instance there might be truth in it. Rock has a large canvas, a controversy and targets. He can't not be stoked to attack and mock.
Mind you, in the larger cultural context, the #OscarsSoWhite controversy merely points to the increasing irrelevance of film and the American movie establishment. The controversy is a sideshow to a sideshow.
A recent New Yorker piece about the American movie business, and in particular the upstart studio STX Entertainment, contained one of those statements that crystalize the issue: "Movie theatres are no longer where we go for stories about who we are. That's become television's job."
And so, while the Academy goes about the tortuous process of tweaking its membership to, perhaps, create a list of nominees more diverse than this year, television is already miles ahead. It's more diverse, more democratic. TV execs have no fear that white viewers will skedaddle at the sight of a non-white face. And TV is, without making a fuss, fully engaged in telling stories about non-white characters, families and communities.
Recently I saw Straight Outta Compton, the Oscar-nominated movie and, frankly, found its storytelling technique and trajectory all too familiar and predictable. I wished the story had been told, as it deserves, on a 10-13 part cable TV series. Fact is, movies don't need to be of any quality to get attention and awards. Television does.
Ironically, this year's Academy Awards might be good TV, without anyone trying. Except the host, who has been gifted an astonishing opportunity to rescue the Oscars broadcast from utter irrelevance.
Airing Wednesday
X Company (CBC, 9 p.m.) returns for a second season tonight.
Our heroic spies are in occupied France. The crisis initiated at the end of last season continues – memory-man Alfred (Jack Laskey) has been captured by the Gestapo. If he breaks down, then he can reveal everything. Because he remembers everything. There are long interrogation scenes in the episode, which play out less as savage grilling than as theatre.
As often with X Company, an antique kind of melodrama is the engine that drives it. Things are overstated constantly. At the end of the episode, someone is still stating the episode's entire premise – "We're in trouble if we don't get Alfred out before he breaks … " We know that already. It's unsubtle and while there have been promises of "a darker, grittier season of X Company," it still seems very creaky, clean-cut entertainment.