In Another 48 Hours, We’ll Know If The Oscars’ Audience Replacement Therapy Worked
deadline.comIn another 48 hours, we’ll know if it worked—the Oscar show’s Audience Replacement Therapy.Almost inevitably, total viewers for Sunday night’s Academy Awards telecast on ABC will rise from last year’s pathetic 10.4 million.
The bar is very low, and other recent awards shows—the Emmys, SAG, Critics Choice—have all caught a bounce. For the Oscars to miss the general uptick would be disastrous indeed.But the more interesting issues will involve the identity of that presumably expanded audience.
Because, in the run-up to Sunday night’s show, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences apparently has been working not so much to get its lost viewers back, as to replace them.Oscar producer Will Packer, talking with IndieWire, has pointed toward the Super Bowl, describing an event strategy calculated to entice viewers with songs, laughs and entertainment value, no matter who is playing in the game.
The theory is that core movie fans will show up in any case; the rest will come for Billie Eilish or Beyoncé or the trio of comic hosts, Amy Schumer, Wanda Sykes and Regina Hall.The described approach, in truth, isn’t so different from that of a decade ago, when showmen-producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron gave us host Seth MacFarlane and the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles singing “We Saw Your Boobs.” It was tasteless, but it attracted 40.38 million viewers.Still, there’s something more pointed in the air this year.
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