This Sunday, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will present its 95th annual awards to the movies of the previous year. While Hollywood is excited, the nationwide ratings for the Oscar awards show have been declining for years now. The show is too long, scheduled for four hours but often running five, so even avid movie fans tend to skip watching it live.
The problem is that the producers are working with obsolete concepts of drawing a television audience: keep them tuned in, and keep them waiting. In the 20th century, the audience had no choice. If you wanted to see how many awards your favorite movie won, you had to sit through production numbers, technical awards, and stand-up routines. With the internet, you can get notifications for the parts you really care for. Yet movie fans all have different parts they care about.
The Ringer proposes a plan to bring viewers back to the Oscar ceremony by breaking the telecast into three parts aimed at different kinds of movie fans. It sounds ingenious. On its face, the plan appears to be sacrificing a captive four-hour audience, but those viewers are already gone. It could bring back many of those viewers, albeit for shorter segments. The reasoning behind each part of the new plan is explained in detail, and it might just work. The sad part is that this plan is not only too late for the ceremony coming up March 12, but also that it was not proposed by the Academy itself. -via Digg
Next - Lose those tiresome song and dance numbers and poorly executed segments of people bantering with each other about nothing.
Third - showcase the nominated people in 2 minute clips from their movie so we can see how they performed their craft and why they deserve an award.
Fourth and probably the most important thing to change is the time alloted to their speeches. Give them a full 5 minutes to have their say. They don't need to use all that time but I really hate it when they start playing them off with music while they are in mid sentence.
Finally, have all the winners assemble on the stage at the end of the show so we can see all of the winners together.