http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/01/movies/awardsseason/01oscar.html?_r=1&ref=arts
Younger Audience Still Eludes the Oscars
By MICHAEL CIEPLY and BROOKS BARNES
Published: February 28, 2011
James Franco and Anne Hathaway, the co-hosts of the 83rd Academy Awards.LOS ANGELES — The Oscars tripped in their transition to a hipper, younger, media-mad future, attracting 12 percent fewer viewers than last year in the important 18-to-49 age bracket.
Early ratings results for Sunday night’s broadcast of the 83rd Academy Awards ceremony on ABC pointed toward an overall audience of 37.6 million, about 4 million viewers short of last year’s 41.7 million.
In a year when ratings for the Grammys, the Golden Globes and the Super Bowl were all up, the bright, new Twitter-fingered Oscars were down.
Tom Sherak, president of the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which bestows the awards and produces the telecast, was not ready to concede defeat, however. “I think it’s a beginning — everything needs to start somewhere,” Mr. Sherak said in a telephone interview. “Something didn’t work? Let’s try to fix it.”
The viewership figures mean that these annual movie awards are still chugging along as a spectacle one-third the size of the Super Bowl, almost as big as a good playoff game and down about 34 percent from their own contemporary ratings peak, in 1998, when
“Titanic” helped deliver more than 57 million viewers.
But even these soft ratings may go down as an achievement, given the forces and flubs that threatened to sink the show after a season so trying that even
Scott Rudin — a producer who had both
“The Social Network” and
“True Grit” among the best picture nominees — decided to stay home in New York rather than attend.
Mr. Rudin was tied up with previews for his Broadway musical, “The Book of Mormon,” as well as the first weekend of shooting in New York on “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” A film directed by
Stephen Daldry.
Having moved on, Mr. Rudin missed being there to watch a film distributed by his sometime business rival
Harvey Weinstein take the best picture Oscar.
“The King’s Speech” took that trophy, along with prizes for its screenplay, by
David Seidler; its director,
Tom Hooper; and its lead actor,
Colin Firth.
But Mr. Rudin also sidestepped a show that was working hard to stay afloat amid the debris of a season that inflicted some damage on almost everyone who took part. With 10 nominations, “True Grit” got no prizes. “The Social Network,” once considered a lock for best picture, won awards only for its script, its score and its editing;
“Toy Story 3” won best animated movie, but there was the simultaneous suggestion that voters don’t take that art form seriously in the top race.
The Academy had to make do this year without an
“Avatar,” the sort of late-season, prize-worthy crowd pleaser that automatically draws an audience to the show. Instead, it worked hard — you could almost hear the gears grinding through montages that made obligatory turns in all directions — to build its 10 best pictures into an engine strong enough to drive the show.
But the campaigners behind those films, and much of the audience, were already worn out by months of promotion as studios had kept “The King’s Speech,” “True Grit,”
“The Fighter,” “Black Swan,” “127 Hours” and “The Social Network” in theaters, even while easing up on new releases. While most of those films piled up respectable ticket sales, the overall box office, starved for fresh fare, is down 21 percent so far this year, compared with the same period in 2010, according to Hollywood.com’s box-office service.
What needed to be fixed, in Mr. Sherak’s eyes?
He said he would wait to discuss that with Academy governors in the weeks ahead. “Did allowing so much behind-the-scenes access take some of the mystique away?” he said of a tactic that was intended to bring the young audience aboard via Twitter, Facebook and an enormous array of backstage streaming video via
Oscar.com. “Maybe some of that criticism is right, but all I know is that you can’t get everything right all the time.”
“You get criticized for trying something; you get criticized for not trying something,” said Mr. Sherak, whose show came in for some public denigration as well as a share of private grousing by those in the game. “The only absolute is that not trying makes you old and stodgy.”
Sunday night’s show was not overly long. At about 3 hours and 11 minutes, it appeared to be the shortest since 1986, the year
“Out of Africa” won best picture. But there was a cost to the hurry-up approach. Those at the controls managed to destroy the big moment for a producer of “The King’s Speech,”
Gareth Unwin, by loudly bringing up the orchestra before he had gotten out a word — as if a guy behind the year’s winning movie was just one more embarrassing Englishman to be hurried off the stage in the interests of good television.
“I want to be good television so badly, as you can see,” said
Randy Newman, as he apologized on the air for having to say thank you to people who helped him win the Oscar for his musical work on “Toy Story 3.” (Backstage, Mr. Newman picked up on the weary, wrung-out mood when he responded to a chipper college reporter’s question about breaking into the music business by responding: “Who would want to break into it? It’s like a bank that’s already been robbed.”)
Tom Hanks, a member of the Academy’s governing board, inadvertently pointed to one of the season’s biggest problems — the fragmentation of honors, with no film reaching critical mass — early in the show. He opened with a spiel about a “trifecta” of cinematography, art direction and best picture awards having distinguished great films like
“Lawrence of Arabia” and “Titanic,” then presented the cinematography award to
“Inception” and the art direction prize to
“Alice in Wonderland,” neither of which had a prayer of becoming best picture.
The night’s young co-hosts,
Anne Hathaway and
James Franco, were unlikely to get the career lift many predicted when they were unexpectedly appointed. Instead of showing how they were stars with enough wattage to carry moviedom’s biggest moment, the pairing emphasized their flaws as performers: a squinty-eyed, all-too-relaxed Mr. Franco came across as not taking his job that seriously, and the frequent industry argument that Ms. Hathaway lacks chemistry with her male co-stars was given a fresh example.
A series of elaborate gags and production numbers, more than a few playing off their status as greenhorns, turned the hosts into straight men for
Billy Crystal — perhaps the last of the great Oscar hosts? — who showed up at midshow to a standing ovation and sopped up the applause.
“No, no, no, no, go ahead,” said Mr. Crystal, encouraging the crowd to love him a little more than they loved what they were getting this year.
But Mr. Franco and Ms. Hathaway survived. And for the Oscars, there’s always next year.
