The Academy Begs you to Stop Paying Attention to them even more [TheJamesMadison]

It's been a long term problem for the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences that their audience for the Oscar broadcast is getting smaller and smaller with every passing ceremony. The only time they seemed to care about this was the year after The Dark Knight could have been nominated and then wasn't. The Academy felt itself becoming irrelevant and decided to expand the Best Picture category from 5 movies to up to ten (there have only been ten nominees a couple of times since).

Well, the very next year the biggest movie ever, Avatar did get nominated, but no one thought it had a chance anyway, and while ratings have bounced up and down, they've never even begun to recover to the more historic numbers of decades past.

Well, it looks like that experiment in relevance is dead and buried.

Brought on by some changes at the top of the board earlier this year, they've upped their minority representation in both membership and on the board as well. And what did this do?

Did it increase the broad appeal of Academy choices?

Did it help align the Academy with the greater public?

Well, of course not. It wasn't designed to do that. It was designed to bend the knee to wokeness, and now the results are in.

"New Oscars standards say best picture contenders must be inclusive to compete" says the LA Times.

To be eligible for best picture, a film must meet at least two standards across four categories: "Onscreen Representation, Themes and Narratives," "Creative Leadership and Project Team," "Industry Access and Opportunities" and "Audience Development." Within each category are a variety of criteria involving the inclusion of people in underrepresented groups, including women, people of color, LGBTQ+ people and those with cognitive or physical disabilities.

The Oscars have steadily become a wokeness center, and now they're diving in with headfirst without any care in the world. Like many institutions in our culture today, they care far more about the opinions of Twitter and their peers more than what their core competencies are supposed to be. Long gone are the days when the Oscars celebrated movies with mass appeal, replaced by a desire to be as appealing to a narrow set of activists as possible.

The Oscars haven't been relevant in a while, but this just cements the fact that the Oscars aren't going to be relevant to the masses again any time soon.

Their appeal is becoming more selective at an ever-increasing pace.

posted by Open Blogger at 05:11 PM

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