The Oscars’ Popularity Crisis

Hollywood has conditioned me to accept some nips and tucks, but what should I do when the Oscars venture into the realm of the extreme makeover?

Tune in on March 27, and you’re likely to notice a refreshed telecast, according to a recent flurry of announcements from the academy. There will be a slimmer figure, born from slicing several awards from the live show. There will be a new face — three of them, in fact, in the guise of hosts. And now that the show is adding two fan-voted awards meant to raise online engagement, I half-expect Oscar’s lips to be as pursed as a social-media influencer’s trout pout.

It’s a whole lot of change for a telecast that can sometimes be thuddingly traditional. But are all of those tweaks a good thing?

Your Projectionist has got nothing against cosmetic procedures, but I recall that on the soapy drama “Nip/Tuck,” the plastic surgeons opened every consultation by asking, “Tell me what you don’t like about yourself.” Too many of these Oscar decisions seem motivated by bone-deep insecurity — a sort of self-loathing from the academy about what the show really is, let alone what it ought to be.

Let’s examine the changes one by one.

The Popularity Contest

It was the Valentine’s Day gift no one asked for: On Feb. 14, the academy debuted a new contest letting fans vote online for their favorite film and most “cheer-worthy” movie moment, both of which will be announced on the telecast. The not-so-subtle implication: If John and Jane Q. Public are mad that the best-picture race snubbed the year’s biggest movie, “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” then this make-good could still make room for it.

The academy’s vision was populist, but the reality is niche: The contest has erupted into an internet turf war between fan armies voting for the year’s most quickly forgotten movies. Peruse the #OscarsFanFavorite hashtag and you’ll find a cadre of Johnny Depp supporters casting vote after vote for his little-seen drama “Minamata,” while fans of the director Zack Snyder, fresh off their successful push to #ReleaseTheSnyderCut of his film “Justice League,” attempt to stuff the ballot box for Snyder’s so-so Netflix film “Army of the Dead.”

Both bids may prove no match for the unexpectedly rabid fan army of pop singer Camila Cabello, whose devotees have launched an #OscarsFanFavorite bid to signal-boost her Amazon musical “Cinderella,” a flick best known for the promotional sketch where Cabello’s co-star James Corden cavorted like a sleep-paralysis demon in the middle of a Los Angeles street. (“Cheer-worthy” isn’t quite how I’d put it.)

The Oscars have walked this perilous path once before, when plans to introduce a popular-film award in 2018 were met with controversy and quickly scuttled. But the presence of bigger movies doesn’t always mean bigger ratings.

“American Sniper” was the highest-grossing film of 2014, but its inclusion in the best-picture lineup hardly drew more eyeballs: In fact, that telecast dropped in the ratings from the previous year, when “12 Years a Slave” won the top Oscar. And though the Emmys routinely nominate blockbuster shows like “WandaVision” and “The Mandalorian,” and the best-drama Emmy went to the mammoth “Game of Thrones” four times, the Oscars still pull a bigger audience.

Why? Because the Oscars’ rarefied sensibility actually means something, and that aspirational golden sheen shouldn’t be watered down — indeed, it’s the whole reason people pay attention.

If the academy and its broadcast partner, ABC, worried less about which movies were nominated and more about making the show entertaining, they’d be on to something: A key reason the “12 Years a Slave” Oscars outrated the “American Sniper” Oscars is that the former was hosted by a selfie-taking Ellen DeGeneres at the peak of her talk-show fame.

And on that note …

The Three Hosts

First, after three years without an M.C., let me praise the academy for hiring hosts. Wanda Sykes, Amy Schumer and Regina Hall are entirely capable, and anything that gets the tremendous Hall in front of more Oscar voters is a good thing, since she’s been doing award-worthy work in films like “Support the Girls” and the coming “Honk for Jesus, Save Your Soul.”

Oscar hosts help give the telecast an identity, and they’re often responsible for the sort of buzzworthy moments that this sort of show sorely needs. At their best, they can even provide a ratings bump: When a good hire is made, viewers will tune in just to see what the host is going to say or do.

But I wonder whether the academy has missed the mark. This trio feels like a lineup imported from 2015 — when Schumer was still riding high off her big-screen comedy “Trainwreck” — instead of one that has any meaningful relationship to the year 2022. And the three women were announced awfully late in the game: Just days before their Feb. 15 unveiling, the academy was still in negotiations to add Jon Hamm as a fourth host.

If the Oscars really want hosts who will encourage people to tune in, they should start locking them in a year in advance, since big stars like Dwayne Johnson and Ryan Reynolds need that kind of lead time to start clearing their schedules. Instead, the academy typically starts its search after a producer is hired — and this year’s producer, Will Packer, wasn’t announced until October. That’s way too late to begin booking A-listers.

And if ABC is so determined to give comic-book blockbusters a sizable presence on the show, can’t it work with its Disney corporate partner Marvel Studios to encourage some of those superheroes to host? Imagine Tom Holland and Zendaya dressed to the nines, Paul Rudd and Simu Liu trading witty quips, or the excitement that would ensue if Robert Downey Jr. took over the Oscars for a major post-Marvel pop! Nab one of those stars early enough — say, before their next superhero film comes out — and they’ll be doing free publicity for the Oscars for a full year.

The Trimmed Telecast

On Tuesday afternoon, academy President David Rubin sent a letter to members announcing that eight of this year’s awards won’t be presented live on the telecast. Instead, the winners in those categories will accept their statuettes inside the Dolby Theater an hour before the show begins, and those victories will be condensed and edited into the main broadcast.

Does that mean viewers who are following along on Twitter will have the results spoiled far in advance? Apparently! Will the winners have to deliver their speeches to a half-full Dolby Theater, since the biggest stars will still be out on the red carpet? Sure seems that way!

Three of the edited-for-time categories are the short-film awards, and I understand the impulse to quickly dispense with them — in fact, I’ve argued before that they should be cleaved from the night entirely, since the ceremony should be dedicated to feature-length films. But the other five categories getting the chop are production design, score, editing, makeup and hairstyling, and sound, all of which are essential to the art of moviemaking. These races also tend to honor the big blockbusters that the Oscars claim to want more of on the telecast.

Rubin maintains that viewers will hardly notice this “seamless” change, but Twitter is already in full revolt, and the young, social-savvy audience that the Oscars are hoping to court will get the impression that the show is apologizing for itself in advance, as the Oscars too often do. Is it really worth all this fuss in pursuit of just a few trimmed minutes, when the Super Bowl routinely makes its immensity part of the draw? Doesn’t this threaten to antagonize the people who actually like watching the Oscars being handed out, instead of drawing viewers who weren’t going to watch anyway?

Change can be a good thing, but the Oscars are so desperate to make themselves over for approval that even Cassie from “Euphoria” would blanch. I understand the desire of a patient this venerable to go under the knife. But isn’t the goal of all good plastic surgery to still look like yourself in the end?