The Academy Awards are a big nothing
The show was too long! The hostess wasn’t funny enough! I’ve barely even heard of most of the movies that were nominated!
Everything about the Academy Awards is rather underwhelming, except for the length of the proceedings. The whole affair seems to be either missing the mark or setting its sights too low to begin with. It doesn’t do a very good job of promoting movie watching, Oscar bumps notwithstanding. The show itself isn’t particularly entertaining. Or entertaining at all, to be frank. People like watching movies. Watching people watching one or two people talking about some aspect or another of movie-making is just at dull as it sounds. As the popular TV-show American Idol has demonstrated, the real entertainment is to be found in the process that ends in the crowning of the winner, not the crowning itself. But viewers get to see nothing at all of the back-door dealing, the lobbying, the back scratching, the back stabbing, the vendettas, agendas, pettiness, and eventual voting that creates winners and losers.
That would have been acceptable had the Awards and their subjects had the kind of seriousness that commands respect, but they do not. A s a viewing event the Awards could be salvaged by making them as viewer-friendly as possible, but instead they are uniformly tedious spectacles of unearned pomposity.
Most of the value that the Oscars create is captured by The E! Channel, MTV, network-television entertainment shows, glossy celebrity-gossip magazines and other hangarounds that subsist on cheap or scandalous content.