2025 Oscarwatch – Lessons from 2024…Advice for the Coming Season

Outside the bubble, Hollywood and the Oscars have become the hated. They don’t realize this because they don’t have to. They have a magic mirror to tell them who’s the fairest of them all. It is a flattering echo chamber full of people who are either true believers or are too afraid to speak out.

Very few inside the bubble can name the problem because they can’t see it. And it might not even be a problem if the Oscars will do what the Globes and the SAG have done: expand their reach onto the world of a streaming platform. The Golden Globes will take place January 5th, broadcast simultaneously on CBS and on Paramount+. The SAG Awards are now available to a global audience on Netflix. And here might lie the best future for the once all-mighty Academy Awards tumbling headlong into their 100th year. They may very well exist as nothing more than a niche curiosity and a delivery device for hungry egos looking to have that honor next to their name to negotiate better deals so that people will say “Oscar nominee” or “Oscar winner” every time their name is mentioned.

Millions of people outside the bubble are rooting for the demise of both Hollywood and the Oscars because they hate what they have become. The Oscars probably can’t ever return to what they once were, but it does seem strange that they now seem content to appeal to such a small minority of people who share what one might call “elitist” tastes. In other words, in shaping the Oscars to the taste of the film critic hivemind, they have entirely defeated their original and longtime purpose.

I should say that few people reading this will probably agree, neither will those who cover the Oscars here or anywhere else. They’re in survival mode. How can they keep the plates spinning one more year? It’s harder for me to do that because I can see the problem and because I can’t keep my big mouth shut.

So bear with me as I outline some ideas about how I think the industry and the Oscars can fix themselves, even if they will never be what they once were.

First, let’s start with a little bit of history. Back in the 1950s, the box office was having another moment of crisis. The reason for this was that the films of the 1950s, like the culture, were caught up in a utopian vision for America, a Leave it to Beaver kind of ideal life.

As mid-century Hollywood scrambled to stem faltering ticket sales to compete with TV, studios in the 1950s tried several solutions that were ultimately as ineffective as band-aids on an arterial stab wound. Their temporary remedies — Cinemascope, 3D, even Smell-o-Vision — failed to work in the long run because it takes more than gimmicks to prop up the box-office in a meaningful way. The hard lessons Hollywood got taught years ago need to be re-learned today, as studios now chase the international box office rather than focus on the domestic audience. To explain why I think this is a mistake, we’ll compare the similarities between the two eras.

A major mistake studios made after the horrors of World War II and the Great Depression, was to think America wanted to see a sanitized, fantasy version of reality. The problem with this attitude was that there was a simmering counterculture on the rise — one that would be more interested in hard, gritty truth than what most Hollywood movies were willing or able to provide. As for the few films that did explore darker themes in the fifties, they were not all that different from what people could see during the Golden Age of television — partly because the New York filmmakers were ahead of the game.

A turning point came when studios began to subvert the Hays Code that had been enforced since the mid-1930s. Hollywood realized they needed more provocative leeway to compete with the newfound freedom of international cinema, as astonishing “New Wave” cinema movements were blooming in numerous countries around the world. The Hays Code was finally abandoned altogether in 1968, instantly allowing American films to be more shocking and more daring. more sexual and more violent. Hollywood at last could explode outward in ways that nobody back then could have predicted. That’s why films of the 1970s were so damned good.

Well, here we are again. The same sort of dynamic is underway. Hollywood seems to be once again aligned with the government, as it was in the 1950s. We have the same kind of paranoid witch hunts and a “woke scare” that separates the “good” people from the “bad” people. The way I see it, we have an industry that is 100% married to the doctrine of the government, with tentacles that have even spread to public schools and universities.

Funnily enough, we’re now all the way on the other end of the spectrum. It is the very thing people in 1950s America feared the most: a Communist-like ideology that is now indoctrinating the young via culture. It’s hard to argue with this interpretation, what with Barack and Michelle Obama signing a Netflix deal, Rob Reiner making a documentary about Christian Nationalists. And films like Sound of Freedom being demonized and shut out of the mainstream culture.

So, changing all of this is going to take a lot of work. But the signs are there that people in charge can see the current strategy isn’t working. The industry is collapsing. Storytelling has bottlenecked and the majority of the public sees the Oscars and the film industry as not worth their time (at best) and obnoxious and toxic at worst.

Abolishing the Hays Code in 1968 solved some of Hollywood’s problems, but not all. Television would always compete with movies for attention, just like streaming and social media compete now. As I’ve said many times, Hollywood can’t fix itself, but a counterculture revolution, already underway, will force change anyway, and for the better.

I do think there are some things the Academy can do to “fix” the Oscars that might help boost ratings but more importantly, make the Oscars useful beyond being yet another sanctimonious lecture by people who see themselves as morally superior to the rest of America.

The Problem

There’s a stark disconnect between the industry, the Oscars, and the general public. As I said, people “inside” don’t see this as a problem. But let’s say for the sake of argument that the people in Oceana did care about the Proles. What could they do to fix it?

1. Reduce the Best Picture nominees back down to five. After WWII, that is exactly what the Academy did because the war had necessitated a decrease in film production output. Five Best Picture nominees with five Best Director, Acting, and Writing categories is the way to go. No one cares about ten because they don’t care about the movies nominated, with very few exceptions. Why is there nothing nominated other than more of the same movies no one, except those inside the bubble, care about? I argued once, a long time ago, that increasing the Best Picture slate to ten could help the Academy highlight more films directed by women and non-white directors, and I really did think that would solve the problem—but it hasn’t. If anything, it’s made it much worse. They have diluted their power in the Best Picture prize. Except for last year, Best Picture has felt almost meaningless.  I will explain why this hasn’t worked further on down the piece.Going back to five Best Picture nominees will celebrate big movies, or even smaller movies, that have risen to the top because they of their excellence by a majority vote. That will mean they hold their place in history more, are remembered more, and make more money at the box office. Having ten is just a way of satisfying film critics and the people who cover the Oscars, but that is such a small minority of people it doesn’t make sense to focus on only their needs.

   People have said to me, doesn’t this mean you will make less money? Well, not really. For one thing, Disney has a monopoly on big Fox, Searchlight, Disney, etc. The studios are consolidating, and the films lined up for awards usually fall under one or the other of the monopolies. So why not make it a competition between studios rather than casting a wider net for all of their movies to get in?

   Get rid of the preferential ballot, go back to five.

2. The five Best Picture nominees should be theatrical films, not streaming. And that could mean there is another category for Best Picture, streaming. If Netflix is going to compete, their films should be theatrical movies too, like Apple is doing. That is, if they want to be in the Oscar race. This is a little more controversial, I know, because that ship has mostly sailed. But Apple showed us that you can do both, have a big movie like Killers of the Flower Moon and also have it be a theatrical experience.
3. Expand the International Feature category and remove the regulations that say countries have to submit an official entry. Talk about something that has gone way out of date. Open up the International Feature category to  include 10 nominees – and think about having an entirely separate competition for international with its own categories for international acting, directing, writing, etc. Call them the International Academy Awards and air them on Netflix. International features are kicking Hollywood’s ass. Writers and filmmakers in other countries don’t have their balls in a vice and can still tell great stories — but the Oscars are designed to prop up the American film industry because the entire economy depends on it. Local crews depend on it. Movie theaters depend on it. Why have the Oscars at all if it’s just going to be a naval-gazing exercise in futility to have Film Twitter applaud the efforts? With ten slots for International Feature, you have a way to invite people to view the broad array of brilliant films from all over the world — and five just isn’t enough. I also think the Documentary Feature category should expand to ten as well, for the same reason. These categories are exploding with creative talent, while it’s now proving harder and harder each year to fill ten Best Picture slots with American movies.
4. It’s time to drop the “Woke” act. Hollywood isn’t fooling anyone. When they did not award Lily Gladstone the prize and have awarded Best Actress to only two women of color in 96 years, it’s time to say the “woke” thing is a virtue-signaling failure that killed the Oscar brand. They should eliminate the DEI mandate and make a public announcement about it. They should stop pretending to be something other than what they are. They are who they are. They are 70% male and 80% white. The male part means Emma Stone was always going to win because she is having sex six ways from Sunday. By contrast, Cate Blanchett, last. year, played a gay woman, and there was no transactional relationship with the mostly hetero “steak eaters.” Listen, I’m not shaming. I’m only saying stop pretending. It’s like watching sharks try to be vegetarians. You are who you are, and America is what it is — 70% white, mostly heterosexual, mostly Christian.

1. Trust the Free Market. Stop listening to activists. Start listening to audiences. What made money? Top Gun Maverick, Barbie, Oppenheimer. Big movies with big stars. Of these, only Barbie is “woke,” but really, when you think about it, she’s still at the top as the white blonde. This doesn’t mean that Hollywood should only cast white people, but it does mean that the people you hire have to be box-office draws, no matter their skin color. Stop trying to fix people. Just give them what they want.The Woke injections ring false anyway. You are fooling no one. We all just patiently tolerate it and hope it goes away. It serves the people at the top to avoid bad pubilcity. That’s all it does. It doesn’t change society. It doesn’t make things better for non-white people. They are always going to only represent absolution for the white people.

   Wokeness wrecks movies. Take the movie Anyone But You. A movie with two good-looking white people, heterosexual, at the top. But because they had to meet the requirements of the activists that have infiltrated Hollywood far more seriously than the Catholics did during the Hays Code, the film is cast in a peculiar way. A lesbian couple is getting married, but they have no distinguishing characteristics other than the fact that they’re checking off the box so GLAAD doesn’t scream at them. Had one been a butch lesbian and the other a lipstick lesbian, that might have been funny. Had a parent been homophobic and weirded out, and that was a conflict that had to be worked through, at least it is acknowledging what is actually happening. But instead, as usual, you get fake euphoria that doesn’t seem real.

2. Bring back the best of everything: the best writers, directors, and editors. Is it going to be dominated by white men? I don’t know, but I do know that you can’t sacrifice excellence to make everyone feel better for five seconds by pretending a reality that doesn’t exist. Enough. End it. We all want to see movies with the best people making them. A small portion want to see a utopian diorama that makes everyone feel good about their world. Forget it. That isn’t the job of Hollywood.
3. Dump Jimmy Kimmel – Sorry, Jimmy, you’re too political for the Oscars. I continue to recommend someone offensive and brave. Ricky Gervais would be an overnight sensation that would get the right people angry and bring the numbers way, way up for the telecast. That’s the way to go. That has always been the way to go, and it remains so today. The more you reflect outward that Hollywood is an insulated little club full of people who hate the American majority, like Jimmy Kimmel does, the less people are going to be interested in any of it.
4. Divorce the Democratic Party. We have to get over the idea that the Oscars are our politics — or our parents, or our counselors, or our Church. They aren’t. They exist to honor high achievements in film; once they return to that, they will return to having relevance again.  It’s bad enough that all of the documentaries now are, in some way, in keeping with the Democratic Party platform. Why would even want to do that? Try to remember that it’s a country full of 330 million people.
5. Keep the producers from last year and the uplifting mood of the ceremony. All of that worked. The more people know the Oscars are going to be fun, the more they might consider watching. Change isn’t all about the telecast, but the telecast is the face of the industry. It is who and what they represent and right now, they represent insulated and isolated Woketopians — or as Laurie Anderson once called Heaven, “a perfect little world that doesn’t really need you.”
6. Bring Back Men – yes, you heard me. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. Eliminating men is the biggest single mistake Hollywood has made. Not just men but macho, masculine men. They are the caffeine in the coffee. Bring them back. Beautiful women and hot men will bring people back. Celebrities and the Oscars are our showcase for the gods. If they aren’t gods, why would anyone bother? They can look out the window. They can walk to the park.  This is the only time in Oscar history where we did not have strong leading men. We have these kind of muted, feminine men and for a lot of us, that won’t do.

So there you have it. My ten point plan to bring back Hollywood and the Oscars.

I do have one more suggestion, and that is this: Movies will get better when the entire industry gets over itself and stops acting like it’s the end of the world because Donald Trump exists. I promise you that the majority of what you know about him and his supporters is propaganda designed to keep you outraged and politically compliant. But whatever that is, that need to separate this country into an “us vs. them” mentality isn’t serving anyone, least of all, Hollywood.