[Thi Them]

Yes Vickie, you count. I'd like to see you continue the guild thread. But it does take a lot of work to maintain threads like that, and it sucks that there has been a decline in this area of the forum.


~T

[Haggai]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Michael Reuben

Aside from the general downward trend in viewership, the writers' strike really messed them up. Not knowing until pretty late in the game what kind of show they were going to have, they did a lot less promotion. I think many people didn't even know when the Oscars were on this year.

I think your point about the writers strike and the lack of promotion is the main reason why the Oscar telecast ratings were down as far as they were this year. A look at the actual numbers indicates that something unusual must have been behind the dramatic decline in the ratings this year.

The best cumulative list I've found for comparing ratings by year was in this blog post, from the day of the telecast (so the post didn't include this year's telecast):

Gold Derby Awards News by Tom O'Neil - The Envelope - LA Times

It lists a total number of viewers (I think it's an estimate of the average number of viewers throughout the telecast) for each Oscars show going back to '87. Notice that the large majority of the shows in the last 20 years have had between 40 and 46 million viewers.

The exceptions were, on the high end, the Forrest Gump year (48 mil) and the Titanic year (55 mil). So big popular winners can increase the ratings, as we all know. The exceptions to the 40-46 million range on the low end were: the Chicago year (33 million), the Crash/Brokeback year (39 million), and, now, this year's telecast, which has been reported as having averaged 32 million viewers.

So the two DRAMATICALLY lower rated years were (a) the Chicago year, and (b) this year. Both those years had significantly lower numbers than any other year. The Chicago year was most likely down because the ceremony happened right when the Iraq war started (less than a week into the war). There had to have been SOMETHING unusual going on for the ratings to be that low, so the war is the most likely explanation--why else would the total viewership have gone back UP by 10 million over the next two years?

But what about all the obscure nominees this year? Well, the same could certainly be said of the year that The English Patient won, and neither Million Dollar Baby nor The Aviator were huge hits either (leading to plenty of complaints during the M$B year about "why won't Hollywood nominate popular movies"), but the total viewer numbers were still pretty stable for those years, in the low-to-mid 40 million range. Ratings were down a bit from that level when it was Crash vs. Brokeback (a total of 39 million viewers), but not nearly as down as this year. So it can't be ENTIRELY because of the nominees--there's gotta be something else unusual at play.

The writers strike explanation is pretty clearly the likeliest one. It meant that fewer people had been watching TV leading up to the Oscars telecast, which resulted in decreased promotion on the network. Sure, plenty of people still watched the Oscars, over 30 million, but isn't there a decent-sized chunk of the potential audience (maybe 5 or 6 million) that would say, "Oh, yeah, the Oscars are on, let's watch that," but only so long as they're successfully reminded of it? That must be why the ratings went down as much as they did this year.

[Chuck Mayer]

On HTF specific interests, over the last three years:

The 2005 Official Oscars thread was 21 pages
The 2006 Official Oscars thread was 11 pages
The 2007 Official Oscars thread is just over 3 pages

I'm sure there is some commenting left in us, but this thread will probably end somewhere on this fourth page. Some of that is the decreased traffic in the Movies section here at HTF, and some of that might be the nominees this year.

Is it possible that "new media" is chipping away at how society views the Oscar? Movies, as a business, skew younger than ever now. Those kids might not see Oscars as being as prestigious as some of us did back when. Or is it just the usual sine wave?

[Haggai]

I'm not sure perceptions have changed that much. If you check the viewership numbers in that link I included, you'll see that the number of people who watched the Oscars when Rain Man and Driving Miss Daisy were winning is pretty much the same as the number of people who watched it when Million Dollar Baby and The Departed were winning. And for people about our age (I mean you and me, Chuck), the Oscars in the late '80s were probably when we were at an age that was most likely to have attached real prestige to them. So I don't see how the numbers would support a hypothesis about the Oscars having less prestige for kids today than they did 20 years ago.

[Tarkin The Ewok]

Does being nominated for Best Animated Feature automatically disqualify a movie from a Best Picture nomination? In other words, if the Academy had so desired, could Ratatouille have been up for both, or does some technicality prohibit it?

[Adam_S]

no. it's just unlikely to be nominated in best picture when it has it's own category, much like documentaries and foreign films.

[Holadem]

Quote:

On HTF specific interests, over the last three years:

The 2005 Official Oscars thread was 21 pages
The 2006 Official Oscars thread was 11 pages
The 2007 Official Oscars thread is just over 3 pages

I knew things were bad but damn, it's not just a decline, it's a free fall . At this rate there won't even be an Oscar thread next year.

I clicked one of the earliest "Top 10 Time to Throw Down" threads the other day (I think it was 2000), and it was about a dozen pages long. People were updating theirs lists well into the summer of the following year.

As far as HTF goes, I think the LOTR/SW combo has played a major role in activity this forum used to see. A lot of people came over and hung around mostly for those flicks, but bled over as well into other stuff. There wasn't a year between 2001 and 2005 without a release from these franchises. And I think that period could be considered a golden age of sorts of "genre films" (gosh I hate hate hate that stupid expression) as well (bunch of other stuff came out like Spider-Man, X-Men etc...)

BTW, while Crash and BBM were terrific discussion fodders are evidenced by their (film and Oscars) threads lengths, I am surprised to see that the telecast numbers were just average. The media made a lot noise about those flicks, but it appears the public didn't care any more than usual?

--
H

[Lew Crippen]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Holadem

...

As far as HTF goes, I think the LOTR/SW combo has played a major role in activity this forum used to see. A lot of people came over and hung around mostly for those flicks, but bled over as well into other stuff. There wasn't a year between 2001 and 2005 without a release from these franchises. And I think that period could be considered a golden age of sorts of "genre films" (gosh I hate hate hate that stupid expression) as well (bunch of other stuff came out like Spider-Man, X-Men etc...)

...

--
H

Great insight Holadem.

[TonyD]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Chuck Mayer

On HTF specific interests, over the last three years:

The 2005 Official Oscars thread was 21 pages
The 2006 Official Oscars thread was 11 pages
The 2007 Official Oscars thread is just over 3 pages

I'm sure there is some commenting left in us, but this thread will probably end somewhere on this fourth page. Some of that is the decreased traffic in the Movies section here at HTF, and some of that might be the nominees this year.

Is it possible that "new media" is chipping away at how society views the Oscar? Movies, as a business, skew younger than ever now. Those kids might not see Oscars as being as prestigious as some of us did back when. Or is it just the usual sine wave?

better indication would be total posts in those threads.
everyone has different settings for number of posts per page.

[Patrick Sun]

Perhaps, there's a quasi-correlation between total box office for each of the 5 Best Picture nominees for a given year with the viewership rating or thread length.